


Seven Year Storm

by FódExShippingCo (DuckArmada)



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2020-12-31 06:28:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 47,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21098699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DuckArmada/pseuds/F%C3%B3dExShippingCo
Summary: Someone else is still up.Felix frowns.He doesn’t know why the idea bothers him so much, but it does. Maybe it’s because that means someone else is still awake, still working, when he’s calling it a night.He came to Garreg Mach to make himself the worst thing on the battlefield. He’s supposed to have a head start. Yet someone’s already keeping pace.(OR: Annette and Felix's support scenes made me die a thousand deaths, and now I want to fill in the blanks.)





	1. Great Tree Moon: The Light at the Door

**Author's Note:**

> So NetteFlix wasn't even on my radar until the A+ support scene, at which point I realized I would probably die for an A++ scene, and the more I thought about the ship the more I thought there were interesting dynamics to explore, and you know what, this is AO3, I don't have to justify myself to you

**Great Tree Moon: The Light at the Door**

Everyone in Garreg Mach knows who Felix Hugo Fraldarius is from the moment he sets foot in the monastery. Even the other two houses know the weight of the Fraldarius family name, the lay of their land, the scars in their history.

Felix, by contrast, does not know who any of them are.

And he makes absolutely no attempt to change that as he stalks down the hall of the dormitory, a lone satchel of personal effects slung over a shoulder.

The school year begins tomorrow. Academically speaking, he has enrolled in the Blue Lion house; bluntly speaking, he could not muster a damn to give about houses. On some level, he supposes he ought to sort out titles, faces, and who’s rigging a coup against whom, but there’s a dangerously fine line between getting to know someone and being tricked into liking them.

So he keeps his distance, because the people at Garreg Mach he knows least of all are the ones he used to like.

When he walks into his dorm room, a stack of invitations has already latched onto his desk like a barnacle:

  * Riding with Ferdinand von Aegir—_he wants to gauge Father’s thoughts on the Insurrection of the Seven, _the ghost of Glenn tells him.
  * Tea with Dorothea Arnault—_ She wants a noble husband. _Felix can hear Glenn’s laugh, still. It’s a notion worth laughing at. A husband? Him? Who has time for that?
  * Claude von Riegan wants to practice archery together. _He wants to know how stable Father thinks Faerghus is,_ says the calculating voice that still sounds, after all these years, exactly like Glenn.

_Shut up,_ Felix says back. _Don’t tell me what I already know._

It’s going on four years since the Tragedy of Duscur, and he’s still trying to win an argument with his dead brother. _Pointless._

Almost four years. In Pegasus Moon, Felix will turn eighteen, and at least he’ll win that contest with Glenn: he’ll be older than his brother ever got to be.

Older. Wiser. Stronger. That was what he realized, the day he agreed to go to Garreg Mach: for all the weight of the Fraldarius name, it did not protect Glenn, and it will not protect him. His friends will not protect him. His father will not protect him.

_Strength_ will protect him. Strength alone.

Not the stack of invitations, not fake smiles and gossip, not alliances, not loyalty. Invitations are paper, alliances can break, and his father’s love only sweetened his praise for Glenn’s death.

Strength will protect him, in and out of battle. And Felix has come to Garreg Mach to be the strongest, _worst_ thing on the field.

The school year begins tomorrow. That means he can get a head start.

His baggage stays in the room, and only his practice sword goes with him when he leaves.

All around him, new faces are claiming their rooms, ordering around servants, trying to catch his eye for an introduction. He sees Ingrid at the end of the hall, and pretends he doesn’t. He hears Sylvain in a nearby room, and pretends he doesn’t. The beast who used to be his friend sees him pass, and Felix ignores the flick of his outstretched hand.

He liked them, once. He knew them, once.

But now Ingrid’s heart is curdled over with hate for a butchered people, and she worships at the altar of Glenn’s miserable end. Now Sylvain, who can pick up weapons and spellbooks like he was born holding them, on whose shoulders sit the lives of everyone in the Gautier lands… would rather let his talents rot on the shelf out of pure spite. And the prince…

At the end of the day, Felix thinks the worst thing about the prince is the uncertainty. Ingrid, Sylvain, he knows _how_ they happened, even if he doesn’t know who it made them into. But there’s no way to know if the Dimitri he’d befriended was ever real, or if it was a collar on a boar all along.

He leaves it all behind, and bullies directions out of a passing monk, and marches—_flees,_ Glenn’s voice accuses, _like a coward—_to the training grounds.

They’re as empty as he hoped. He fills them with noise, thrashing training dummies with blow after blow, until even Glenn’s voice is lost in the drills.

He’s seen it, the empty, starving rage in Dimitri’s face; he’s heard the boar’s muttered pleas to the dead.

It never fails to piss Felix off.

It never fails to shake him to his bones.

Felix knows what it’s like to see the dead in his dreams, to hear their voices spilling into every stray thought. But how much more can he lose before it turns him, too, into a beast?

The practice blade slams into the dummy again and again, as the sky dims overhead, as the bells ring and the buzz of the monastery by day settles into the hush of night, because there’s one thing Felix Hugo Fraldarius is certain of: He never, _ever_ wants to find out.

It’s late when he leaves, late enough that the kitchen staff can only offer their apologies and a venison sandwich when he finally stumbles in. (He’s almost positive that the labyrinth of hedges and gazebos were placed outside solely as a way to weed out the lesser students.) A guard points out the shortcut to the second floor of the dorms by the greenhouse. All the dorm windows are dark, no giggles or murmurs breaking the quiet. Everyone else is long asleep.

As he trudges over the lawn and into the night, sandwich in hand, Felix realizes that isn’t quite right. On the first floor, near the end of its section, a thin bar of light carves through the dark at the bottom of a door.

Someone else is still up.

Felix frowns.

He doesn’t _know_ why the idea bothers him so much, but it does. Maybe it’s because that means someone else is still awake, still working, when he’s calling it a night. He doesn’t give a damn about house pride, doesn’t know if that light belongs to a Blue Lion, a Deer, a Red Rooster (or whatever the hell the Empire students are calling themselves.)

He’s here to make himself the _worst_ thing on the battlefield. He’s supposed to have a head start. Yet someone’s already keeping pace.

_Forget about it and get some rest,_ Glenn chides. _You don’t know that they’re working._

Felix stares at that light beneath the door.

Glenn does not relent. _Garreg Mach is spoiled rich kids and charity cases. They probably just fell asleep with a candle burning._

That’s close enough to a solid excuse. Felix takes it, and keeps walking.

The school year begins tomorrow. All he has to do is survive.

* * *

The school year begins tomorrow, and Annette Fantine Dominic is not sure she’ll survive.

The School of Sorcery in Fhirdiad? That was one thing. They taught her theory, and equations, and the numbers and calculations behind casting a fireball the size of a horse at a target. They didn’t teach her to actually _do_ it. That was supposed to be this year, if she hadn’t been recommended to Garreg Mach.

She thought there would be time to practice. She thought she’d have a chance to settle in.

But she _definitely_ overheard Claude von Riegan, future leader of the—Leister? Lecester? Leisurewear?—_the Alliance,_ at dinner, practically shouting to his friend Hilda about a surprise mock battle scheduled for the first day of school. And Claude wouldn’t lie about something like that.

_Wouldn’t he?_

He wouldn’t, Annette tells herself. And if he was…

She can’t take the risk. She can’t fall behind.

The evening was _supposed_ to be spent helping Mercie set up her room, and then Mercie would help with Annette’s room, and maybe sneaking some of the little cakes out of the kitchen. Instead, here she is, walled in by her magic theory books, and with a little wooden doll staring down at her from a shelf. It’s the first and last personal belonging she’d actually unpacked.

It’s a reminder that she can’t fall behind.

Annette knows a lot of the faces from the dining hall, especially the ones from Faerghus. She saw them sometimes in Fhirdiad, though they wouldn’t remember her: Prince Dimitri, Ingrid of House Galatea, Sylvain of House Gautier, and of course Mercie. Others are new to her, like the boy from Duscur, and Lord Lonato’s adopted son.

She didn’t see the one face she knows best, though. The one she knows is here.

She didn’t see her father.

She knows he’s here, _somewhere,_ maybe he’s on a mission, maybe she can bribe a records-clerk with cookies and find out where he’s been stationed, maybe, maybe, maybe. None of the monks or knights knew anything about a Gustave, so he’s changed his name.

Annette doesn’t realize she’s been staring at the wooden doll too long, until it hurts to blink.

He can’t keep running from her forever.

She’s Annette Fantine Dominic. It took her one year—_one—_to land a recommendation to Garreg Mach. One year, and a lot of nights like this: staying up later, studying longer, working harder than anyone else. But it got her where she wanted.

Her father can’t run now, because Garreg Mach is the only place he has left.

She’ll find him here, whether he likes it or not.

No matter what it takes, no matter how many mock battles and pop quizzes and horse-sized fireballs Annette has to duck, she’s going to hang on, because that's who she is.

It took her one school year to make it all the way to Garreg Mach. A new school year starts tomorrow, full of promise—and all she has to do is survive.


	2. Harpstring Moon: The Question

**Harpstring Moon: The Question**

It takes a week for Felix to accept that whoever is staying up as late as he is, they’re also working. Night after night, he passes that door, and the light has not gone out.

It takes another week for him to figure out that it’s someone from his class—the little ginger girl, with the funny braids and the ridiculous bows on her standard-issue boots. It’s just luck, really. He’s passing the first-floor dorms on his way to breakfast, and then _that_ door, the one that’s taunted him for two solid weeks, swings open.

He recognizes her. Why does he recognize her?

_She’s in your own damn class?_ Glenn’s voice asks drily. _Probably where you’ve seen her._

Felix scowls. _Don’t be an ass. That’s not it anyway._

Her room’s at the very end of the middle row, and she leans over the retaining wall to call down to another girl—_also in your class,_ Glenn pesters—walking out of the first room in its row. There’s a lot of…._giggling_ happening.

That’s who he’s been trying to keep up with for two weeks? _That?_

The girl turns around and walks straight into a barrel.

After that, Felix feels significantly less threatened.

It takes another two weeks to realize where else he’s seen her.

Back before things fell apart, when he and Sylvain and Ingrid and Dimitri still ran around the royal palace like little hellhounds, a soft-spoken bulwark of a knight named Gustave had kept an eye on them. Once or twice, his family had visited him on duty—a woman who always had a bag of ginger cookies for them, and a girl who had been caught trying to sneak rare books out of the royal library every single time. (For science, she’d always claimed.)

Gustave’s daughter has kept her braids the same all these years. Felix can’t help but wonder if it’s because she couldn’t keep her father.

It’s not until right before the mock battle that he learns her name, though.

Felix is actually paying attention this time as the new mercenary/professor issues her orders, quiet and sure. He’s not sure if he trusts her enough to follow those orders just yet, especially when the professor hands the clumsy little book-smuggling ginger girl in her pigtails and her bows…an axe.

“Annette,” the professor says, “I understand you’ve been preparing for this battle for quite a while now.”

Annette’s face turns red. “Yes, professor.”

“I have a special assignment for you,” the professor tells her.

After, when they’re debriefing about the battle in the classroom, there are a number of highlights, and Sylvain in particular is delighted to recount them.

There is the moment when Ashe managed to hit Professor Hanneman with a blunted arrow from a frankly indecent distance.

There is the moment—_it’s nothing,_ Felix insists, _child’s play—_when five Imperial students tried to corner him, and wound up discovering what a terrible mistake that was.

But there is one moment that comes up again and again, as both an example of the professor’s tactical genius, and a legendary deed unto itself.

That was the moment when Annette, who had been flinging perfectly-crafted, _terribly-_aimed spells all over the field, saw the leader of the Golden Deer fixating on Dimitri’s head-on charge—the opening the professor had told her to find.

And that was when little Annette flew from the brush at Claude’s back, Crest of Dominic blazing, and swung the blunt training axe into his jaw with downright _vindictive_ enthusiasm.

One hit, and Claude went down cold. And the rest of the Blue Lions can’t stop talking about it.

Sure, Felix dropped five Black Eagles on his own, no distractions, no diversions, no schemes to help him. But Annette swatted the future leader of the Alliance like a fly.

It takes Felix another week to forgive her for that.

Especially when he discovers he can look out his own window and see the light from hers on the lawn below. Night after night, that spill of candlelight outlasts him.

But there’s one thing that helps. It’s going to the dining hall every morning, and watching her walk into the exact same barrel each and every time.

* * *

Annette has known about their next assignment for precisely long enough to give her anxiety.

Sure, it had felt _extremely_ gratifying to knock Claude out like a prizefighter in the mock battle, since he’d been the reason she spent her first day of school yawning and bleary-eyed. But that was a training axe, and at the end of the day he’d laughed it off and even commended her for pulling a fast one on him.

At the end of the month, her class takes on the bandits that hold the Red Canyon. She can’t just knock them out and be done with it; this battle comes with real blood, real iron.

Real death.

She doesn’t know if she’s ready for it. Not with an axe, at least. Magic is arm's length. Magic is clean. 

But her aim’s still hopeless. Not even Mercie can help her with that—aiming is more of a black magic thing. And she’d go to the training grounds to practice, but…

Felix is there, most of the time. And if anyone but Mercie asks, she’ll say he just always seems like he wants to be left alone.

If Mercie asks, though, Annette will tell the truth: she’s pretty sure Felix hates her. Only he and the goddess know why, of course; Annette’s been way too busy, oh, _actually participating in class _to deliberately make a mortal enemy.

Six weeks into the school year, and she already has a nemesis without even trying.

_Father would be so proud._ Annette sets her tray down in the dining hall with a tiny huff. Mercie is still in line for her dinner; Ashe and Ingrid are eating at the end of the table, just a little too far away for her to join them.

A shadow falls across Annette’s plate. She looks up and sees red.

Edelgard, future Emperor of Adrestia, smiles down at her, one hand planted gallantly on her hip, the other balancing a tray with perfect grace.

“I’ve been meaning to speak with you,” she says with her peculiar fusion of absolute conviction and melodious charm. “Your… _handling_ of Claude, it was truly impressive. It’s always nice to see another woman who knows her way around an axe.”

“Oh!” Annette feels her ears go crimson, probably bright enough to match Edelgard’s cape. “Thank you! But it was nothing, really, it was all the professor’s idea—”

Edelgard’s smile tightens. “And yet you swung the axe. It was well done. A shame you were born to Faerghus…you would go far with the Black Eagles.”

And just like that she glides away, Hubert falling into step behind her with a brief, clammy smile shot to Annette.

Annette barely has a moment to think before another voice carries over from the table behind her: “So. Leaving us, are you?”

She jumps a little, and hopes it’s lost as she twists around to look Felix in the eye. He’s regarding her, unreadable as ever, over a plate of the spicy meat skewers. Somehow it doesn’t surprise her that he likes his meals as painful as possible. “Sorry?”

He tips his head at Edelgard’s retreating back. “She was inviting you to transfer. You didn’t notice?”

Annette blinks at him. Then she bursts into giggles.

Felix’s brow furrows. “It’s not a joke. The heir to the Adrestian Empire just asked you to join her class.” His brow furrows even deeper. “You’re the first of us to get recruited.”

She can’t help it; she snorts a laugh outright.

If Felix didn’t hate her before, he certainly does now.

“I’m sorry,” Annette says. “I just—that _thing_ with Claude was a fluke, that’s all. I’m not that good with an axe.”

“The Black Eagles specialize in magic. You could use the help.”

Annette tries not to squirm in her seat. Felix isn’t exactly known for his sweet talk—really, if you struck the exact middle between him and Sylvain, you might have a decent human being on your hands—but he’s more or less ignored her until now.

It’s true she needs to get better at magic, fast. He just doesn’t have to say it out loud.

“I could never abandon the Blue Lions,” she says.

“Even if you’d do better in another house?” Felix asks, almost disgusted. Annette shakes her head. “Why not?”

_Because my father would never forgive me for leaving, _she thinks, and the irony is not lost on her. “Because I couldn’t do that to Dimitri,” she lies instead.

Whatever answer Felix was looking for, that was absolutely not it. He rolls his eyes and picks up a meat skewer without another word. Apparently that’s Fraldarius code for “we’re done here.”

There’s a strange sort of freedom in Felix’s open disdain, though. It means she can’t make things any worse with him than they already are.

So for the rest of the month, she marches to the training grounds when she feels like it (and when she doesn’t have class or chores around the monastery or study sessions with Mercie), and she practices for as long as she wants.

Felix ignores her every time. He’s there when she walks in, and he’s still there when she walks out, and since he’s already miles better with a sword than anyone else in the three houses, Annette cannot for the life of her figure out why.

He has his father, still. He seems allergic to friends. He’s guaranteed to inherit the Fraldarius title.

And he still outlasts her at the training ground, every time.

It keeps her supplied with ruined dummies, at least, the kind that can be recycled into target practice for fireballs and wind-blades. For the first week, every time one of his wrecks is tossed into her pile, she wonders: what is he fighting for?

It takes another week to figure out what she should _really_ be asking.

It’s when she notices he’s not ignoring her, per se; he’s somewhere else when he practices. No one would dare accuse Felix of being unfocused, but wherever he is, it’s not the training ground, and whatever he sees, it’s not a dummy.

It’s personal. The same kind of look she catches on Dimitri when he thinks no one’s looking. The same kind of ache she sees in the mirror sometimes, when she’s about to finally blow out the candle for the night, and she’s telling herself it’s all going to be worth it the moment she finds her father, and praying to the goddess that that’s true.

The question she should be asking on the training ground isn’t _what is Felix fighting for?_

The question is: _What is he fighting?_


	3. Garland Moon: Forget-Me-Not

**Garland Moon: Forget-Me-Not**

Garland Moon makes everyone stupid.

Felix is honestly shocked anyone has time for the nonsense; they’ve been at Garreg Mach for what, two months? How on earth has anyone managed to break hearts already—well, other than Sylvain, who seems to break them as a hobby.

But if he has to side-step one more blushing first-year staring desperately at a classmate’s back, a badly-woven garland trembling in their grasp, he’s going to start breaking more useful body parts.

At least no one’s offered a garland to _him_ yet. There are nice ways to say “I’d rather drown myself in the fish pond than turn into some lovesick lapdog.” Felix just hasn’t figured out what they are.

_You just haven’t taken the time,_ Glenn’s voice reprimands.

_And this month always made you stupid,_ Felix retorts before he can remind himself this argument is long-dead.

It had been one thing when they were all still the palace hellhounds, when Dimitri would lift his chin and shout _I’m going to marry Ingrid!_ and Felix would yell back _No, I’M going to marry Ingrid!_ and Ingrid would push them both into a hedge and declare _I’m not marrying anyone!_ and Glenn would smugly tell them all _I’M marrying Ingrid, our parents say so,_ and Sylvain would leap onto a chair and announce _Well, King Lambert said I’m marrying ALL of you!_

Felix still remembers when that changed.

Every year, the count and countess Galatea made Ingrid give Glenn a garland, with a lot of foot-shuffling and eye-rolling on both sides; then when Glenn was thirteen, he took the garland, and his ears went red, and there was still foot-shuffling and eye-rolling but a strange little smile for the first time. That smile—awkward, reluctant, _hopeful?_—kept showing up after that, only around Ingrid, and by the next year the disease had spread to her too.

What a waste it all was, in the end.

He shoulder-checks the next moon-eyed garland-crowned student in his way as he heads towards the dorms, dropping off his training sword before lunch. The boy’s surprised _“oof”_ does wonders for Felix’s mood.

On the way to the dining hall, he takes the shortcut by the greenhouse. Most everyone’s already at lunch, and the monastery grounds have that midday stillness of hundreds of people suddenly on break.

It’s quiet enough for him to hear someone humming inside the greenhouse.

The door’s ajar, of course. It’s close to midsummer, and the gardeners have to be careful regulating temperature if they don’t want to fry the plants like ants under a glass.

There’s something unsettling about greenhouses to him—maybe because the Fraldariuses belong in mountains and snow and land that only tolerates your presence because to it, you are no more than a fly on an elk’s back.

Greenhouses are too hot, too humid, and they make it too easy for weak things to survive.

He doesn’t mean to stop. He doesn’t know _why_ he stops by the door. Someone’s really going to town on a song in there, and judging by the ridiculous lyrics, he’s pretty sure the performance is not open to the general public.

If anything, it’s brazenly, enthusiastically absurd. It feels _wrong_ in a place like Garreg Mach, where even nonsense like Sylvain’s is a veneer over something deep and dark, a sorrow and an anger none of them have words for yet.

A flash of red-gold, and the culprit swings into view. Annette is belting her heart out, back to him, feet skipping in what _could_ be, academically speaking, considered a dance, though it looks to be cobbled together out of various guard stances. The watering can glugs in her hand, sloshing for emphasis.

It’s so—carefree. Almost defiantly so.

Two months now, and he’s resigned himself that that light is always going to be on under her door when he passes. Lately, it’s been warm enough that her door is even open late into the night to let the breeze pass through, and he’ll catch a glimpse of her copper head bent over paper, still in her uniform sans the jacket, the tight blouse collar unbuttoned and her sleeves rolled up past her elbows.

She’s always working. Admittedly, sometimes it’s to make up for nearly leveling the kitchen with her cooking attempts, and sometimes it’s to pick up the shrine she crashed into, and sometimes it’s to work on her aim in the training grounds—_you know she’s gotten better,_ Glenn reminds him—but she’s always working.

No one works like that, day and night, without a damn good reason.

_Like you,_ Glenn says._ But she doesn’t make everyone else miserable about it._

There is a moment, then, when she ducks between the massive leaves of two Brigid ferns, and the sunlight lands straight on her hair and lights her up like a saint—

And in that moment, Felix is six, and Glenn is reading to him about heroes, and their mother is humming so _carefree_ with her back to the fireplace, and their father is looking at them all like heaven on earth, and goddess, the memory hurts like staring straight at the sun—

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” Felix hears himself say.

_Damned fool,_ Glenn says.

_Too close,_ is all Felix can answer with.

It does the trick. Annette dissolves into a spluttering, furious mess. Part of him feels—_bad?_ Is guilt something he’s still bothering with?

He can’t shake that thought that sounded too much like Glenn: _She doesn’t make everyone else miserable about it._

“You have… nice footwork,” he says grudgingly. “Get something to eat. I can take over watering the plants.”

It’s apparently the wrong follow-up. Annette shouts something about how evil he is, and he says something cynical and apathetic back, and really, this is why he doesn’t _do_ people anymore.

“You can’t just spy on people while they’re singing without even saying anything!” Annette insists, flushed, shaking the watering can at him. “It’s not right!”

That watering can is a little too full, and too close, and too _splashy, _for Felix’s comfort, even if it’s almost midsummer and they’re in a stifling greenhouse.

Besides, she has a point. Not even Sylvain spies on girls. Not that Felix was _spying,_ per se, he was just passing by, and then he got distracted, and then he stared at her slack-jawed for probably a solid minute, and—

In retrospect, it was probably creepy. No, it was definitely creepy. That’s an uncomfortable realization.

Fortunately, he’s well-versed in what to do when feelings make him uncomfortable.

Step one: deny everything.

“I actually did call out that I was coming in,” he lies. “It's not my fault you didn't hear.”

Annette scowls and scolds him for being quiet and berates herself for her song choice (song choice? _That’s_ the issue?) and seamlessly provides the transition to step two:

Be an asshole until the feelings are gone.

It’s not that difficult. A couple of scoffs about the songs and how hungry she clearly is, and Annette has called him _the worst_ (correct) and fled the greenhouse.

Guilt, it turns out, is something that still bothers him, whether or not _he_ wants to bother with _it._ He mumbles something under his breath about watering the plants and does just that, and tries not to think too hard about how he just ruined a perfectly happy moment for his classmate because it made him feel things.

Curiously, Glenn has nothing to say on the subject.

Later that week, Annette walks into the classroom with a garland of lavender and baby’s breath in her hands, and Felix’s stomach—it’s his _stomach,_ he tells himself, nothing nearly so sentimental as his heart—gives a strange little twist.

It better not be for him.

It’s not. It’s for Mercedes, who has a matching garland of lilies and forget-me-nots for Annette.

It’s fine. That’s fine.

Why wouldn’t it be fine?

It’s fine.

Garland Moon won’t make a fool of him.

_Step one,_ Glenn says. _Deny everything._

* * *

Garland Moon used to be Annette’s favorite month. All the flowers in violent bloom, all of Fhirdiad in a _mood—_giggly couples, jittery hopefuls, even just cheery families like hers. She helped her mother pick flowers for Father’s garland, and he wore it solemnly until the petals drooped. That was part of the game, though: Mother could always dip the garland in water, send a pulse of white magic through the stems, and shake the drops off flowers fresh as the moment they were cut.

For the longest time, she wanted to be a healer like her mother. She always planned on going to the School of Sorcery, but when Father had vanished, and not even their uncle could say where he’d gone…

Well. Annette is good at math.

Father was beyond Faerghus’s reach. And he would never defect to another country. That meant he was with the church, and the Central Church commanded their military from Garreg Mach, and Garreg Mach had an Officer’s Academy for the children of Fódlan’s nobility, and…

If you were a prodigy of white magic, the army would take you. It took years of practice, otherwise. After all, it took extraordinary patience and focus to heal in the first place, without slipping up and—Annette didn’t like to think about what happened when healers slipped up. It wasn’t pretty. But to work white magic on a battlefield, to lay a hand on a soldier whose arm dangled by a thread, and convince those veins and muscle and gristle to grow back in an _instant,_ and grow back _right…_

Annette had opted, instead, for black magic.

Her father had made sure she could hold her own with an axe, and that was uncommon among mages, but it meant she was sturdier than she looked, and she knew how to work harder than anyone else. That gave her an edge.

Every army needed black mages to tear through the armor of people like her father. It was faster to learn—_not fast,_ there was no such thing as learning magic fast—and the first year was all theory and math.

Annette has _always_ been good at math.

It was a calculated risk: enroll in the black magic course. Do what she was good at, and demonstrate that she was tougher than she looked. Factor in the days the recruiter from Garreg Mach would come by. Subtract the flicker of sorrow in her mother’s face as she buried herself in the arithmetic of the magic of war.

The equation would balance out, in the end.

Garland Moon was her favorite, once. And there’s still joy in it: the flowers in bloom, the flustered and anxious new couples, the drama and romance of garlands bestowed.

It’s just not the same. Not quite.

Even if her father is at Garreg Mach—she’s not giving up, she’s not losing hope, _goddess_ it’s just so hard to keep it up some days—Annette can’t tell you, honestly, if she’d make a garland for him now.

Luckily, she’s been handed a distraction.

“It was _humiliating__, _Mercie.” Annette buries her face in Mercedes’ pillow. “I don’t even know how long he was listening!”

“He probably heard all of it,” Mercedes says gravely, then melts into her sugar-roll laugh.

Annette rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling in despair. “And now he’s going to tell everyone I sing weird songs and do weird dances and everyone will think I’m just a big joke!”

Mercedes is still laughing. “Yes, I agree. We all know how much Felix loves to gossip.”

Annette winces. Mercedes is the kindest soul she knows, and sometimes jokes or sarcasm are totally lost in her gentle tone. “You don’t think he’ll tell anyone?”

“Doesn’t he always seem busy to you?” Mercedes asks. “Besides, who would he tell?”

“The whole class. Just to be mean.”

Mercedes doesn’t say anything for a moment. When Annette looks at her, there’s a distance in her eyes, and she’s wrapping one sandy blonde lock around a finger. She gets this way sometimes, when she’s thinking about Emile.

Annette knows everything about Emile, and Mercedes knows everything about her father, because when you’re two lonely girls in the Fhirdiad School of Sorcery, that’s what happens.

“I don’t think Felix does anything to be mean,” Mercie says eventually. “I think…he’s a lot like you, Annie.”

Annette sits up, almost horrified, and can’t help a strangled laugh at the idea of Felix dancing around the greenhouse to a loving ode to steaks and cakes in his—dare she say it—tummy-tummy-tum. “Felix is _evil.”_

“Didn’t you say he was always at the training ground last month? And he’s always asking the professor if he can leave for more training. He’s a hard worker like you. You both want to be the best you can.”

“He just wants to be the best at being evil,” Annette mutters.

But Mercie just shakes her head. “That’s not how bad people work,” she says, in the soft way of someone who had to learn that truth the hard way. “And someone like Felix… he pours himself into training for the same reason you study so much. I think he’s afraid.”

Annette blinks. Felix? _“Afraid?”_

Mercie winds that lock of hair around her finger, almost a little too tight.

“Yes,” she says, with a little more conviction this time. “I think he’s afraid to lose.”


	4. Blue Sea Moon: Distance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (just wanna say thank you to everyone who's taken the time to leave such lovely comments! welcome aboard the USS shipping trash fire!)

**Blue Sea Moon: Distance**

No one knows quite what to say to Ashe.

For once, Annette was happy to be near-useless for most of that fight. That’s the thing about specializing in ranged combat: you have to _see_ something for it to be in range. And she’s too far out of practice with her axe now to let it weigh her down in battle. It wasn’t until Sylvain got lucky and took down the enemy mage that she could even fire off a single spell.

From there on, the only mercy in Magdred was that Professor Byleth rushed ahead to take Lord Lonato down herself, swift and clean, instead of waiting for Ashe to fill him with arrows.

Seven years ago, Ashe was a commoner and an orphan, stealing to scrape by.

Now he’s a noble and an orphan, and the heir of House Gaspard.

Annette saw Dimitri go to work the moment they returned, sending letters and speaking with the archbishop and telling Ashe in somber, strained tones that the Gaspard lands will be managed, that their coffers will be secure, that what’s left of his family will be safe. It’s moments like that when she understands Dedue’s devotion to the prince.

Too many nobles use war, and the threat of war, as a way to get what they want. A bludgeon. A boot on a neck.

Dimitri does not go to war to lose. But neither does he labor to remind everyone who won. He’d rather end the fight as fast as possible and hold a hand out to his fallen foe.

If he was just a bit older, Annette thinks, and if he’d been king when charges were brought against Christophe… Lord Lonato might still have his first son. And Ashe might still have a father.

If she didn’t know better, she’d think even Felix feels bad. He sounds more irate than usual, hectoring the professor at her desk as Annette finishes packing up her papers and books for the day.

“…a gifted swordsman, I think my time is best served practicing swordplay technique.”

Or maybe he’s just full of himself, and thinks he’s too good for class.

“Why should I waste my time attending lectures, just to improve my magic skills from mediocre to average?”

_Those are the same thing,_ Annette thinks sourly, _that doesn’t even make sense._

“Knowing magic will make you a stronger swordsman,” the professor answers. Felix _harrumph_s, seemingly unconvinced. “Wouldn’t you agree, Annette?”

Annette jumps. _Why_ did the professor have to bring her into this? “I, er, well—”

Felix’s eyes are burning on her. One wrong word and he’ll _absolutely_ tell everyone about the steaks and cakes song.

“Let’s put this another way. You know three attack spells now, correct?” The professor ticks off her fingers. “Wind, Cutting Gale, and Fireball. What’s your range with those?”

Annette wavers. “Three paces? Four, sometimes?”

“Ten to twelve yards,” the professor says. “Felix, what’s your reach with a sword?”

Felix folds his arms, peevish. “I can dodge a fireball.”

“Can you tell me the difference between the glyphs for Wind and Fireball?”

Felix glares at Annette, as if this is somehow all her fault. _“Obviously_ I can’t.”

“Then how are you supposed to know what to dodge?” The professor tilts her head. “You’ll be stronger for learning magic. You’re dismissed.”

Annette stuffs the last book into her satchel and scurries for the door, feeling pure resentment rolling off Felix like a heat wave as he finishes packing up too.

“Actually.” The professor’s voice stops them both in their tracks. “I think you’ll benefit from a _practical_ demonstration. You’re aware of our mission this month.”

_All_ the Blue Lions are, though they keep it to themselves. All the monastery will be on high alert for an assassination attempt on Lady Rhea.

Professor Byleth has another target for them to guard, though: the Holy Mausoleum.

“I want you two to work together,” the professor continues. “Felix, you’ll handle close-range enemies, and Annette, you’ll handle the long range. I trust you both to be adequately prepared.”

Annette blanches. She doesn’t even need to look at Felix to know he has to be livid. His whole _thing_ is being a lone wolf. He might as well have a special certification of ‘Does Not Play Well With Others.’

“That’s all,” the professor tells them. _“Now_ you’re dismissed.”

She breezes out the door without another word.

Annette _hovers._ She hates hovering; it means indecision, and she’s spent her life deciding what to do, and then charging headlong at it. But the professor told them to be prepared. That means they need… practice.

Felix marches towards the door. Stops. Looks over his shoulder at her.

“Training grounds,” he says, stony. “Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow’s the free day. She’d been planning on baking with Mercie and getting in some reading… maybe the reading can wait? “What time?”

Felix blinks at her, like she’s asked what time the moon is. _“Tomorrow,”_ he repeats, and stalks off.

_All_ of tomorrow? “Wait—I can’t—I have plans—_Felix!”_

He’s already gone.

* * *

“I think,” Sylvain says, “that you just need a girl.” He misreads Felix’s scowl. “Or a boy. Or anyone, really. Whatever floats your—”

Felix cuts him off with another swing of the training sword.

“I _don’t—”_ _slash _“—need—” _block-and-up-and-_riposte “—_ANYTHING.”_

Sylvain’s practice sword goes flying across the grounds, landing in the dirt. He regards the point of Felix’s blade poised at his throat, utterly unperturbed. “I’m just saying you might be a little more…”

“Yield,” Felix orders.

“…relaxed.” Sylvain raises his hands. “I yield.”

Felix takes a step back and lowers his sword. Sylvain’s obnoxious when he gets like this, harping on the magical curative properties of getting laid. It’s not that the idea doesn’t hold certain… intrigue.

He just has other priorities. And besides, there are more practical concerns.

“Relaxed means complacent,” he says stiffly. “Complacent means sloppy. Sloppy means dead.”

“And _that_ sounds like a perfectly healthy attitude about relationships.” Sylvain’s voice oozes sarcasm.

_“You _want to tell me about relationships?” Felix feels his hackles rising—then catches himself.

This is a game of Sylvain’s, and it has been since they got to Garreg Mach: see what it takes to rattle the unflappable Felix Fraldarius. The easy explanation is that it’s just fun for Sylvain, that his friend lives to either push buttons or undo them.

The harder explanation is that all four of them—Sylvain, Ingrid, Dimitri, and Felix—changed four years ago. Felix tries not to bother with the strangers who replaced his friends.

Sylvain, on the other hand, is a surveyor at heart. When an earthquake hits, when disaster changes the very landscape they all stand on, he’s the first one to find a hilltop and trot out with a tripod and a spyglass and measures and maps, and chart out what stable ground is left.

Felix does not like to be measured. He likes being searched for weaknesses even less.

“Pick up your weapon,” he says instead. Sylvain’s eyes flicker. He knows he’s been caught.

_Good._ This conversation needed to be over before it started. And it definitely needs to be over before Annette walks in.

“Uh, hello?”

“Annette!” Sylvain snatches up his sword and all but waltzes into a bow. “Aren’t _you _a breath of fresh air. So glad you could join us.”

Annette scoots out onto the court, fiddling with a sleeve. She’s wearing the monk combat uniform, and that’s—surprising.

It shouldn’t be. She’s a caster, that’s what they wear. He and Sylvain are also in training gear. Did he expect a school uniform?

Then again, Lysithea from the Golden Deer is already certified for the mage class. He thought Annette was a match for her, especially with all the after-hours study. Maybe he was wrong.

“Sorry if I’m late,” Annette says, but with an edge that says she isn’t, not really. “I wasn’t sure when you wanted to get started.”

Felix tries not to frown. He was under the impression that with someone like Annette, ‘as early as possible’ would be implied.

“Set up the dummies,” he barks to Sylvain, who rolls his eyes and bows again, muttering something about ingrates. “You’re going to take shots at the far targets while Sylvain tries to take you out. I’m going to stop him. Got it?”

Sylvain pauses from collecting a dummy from a barrel. “I’m starting to see why the professor wants you to work on your people skills.”

“If you’re not going to be useful—” Felix snaps.

“What good is this for Annette?” Sylvain jams a plain target into the dirt. “She can hit these fine. You’re just making her put on a light show while you practice defending against an enemy who isn’t targeting you.”

Felix feels his neck burn. This isn’t Sylvain trying to get a rise out of him. This is Sylvain at his absolute worst. He _hates_ when Sylvain tries to pull this responsible, thoughtful act out of nowhere.

He doesn’t need Sylvain’s Big Brother mode. He didn’t ask for another one.

Instead he turns his focus to Annette, because annoying as it is, Sylvain isn’t wrong. “Well?” Felix demands.

Annette’s gaze flicks between the two of them. “Well,” she echoes, back to fussing with a cuff, “it’s… true I can hit those. But I’ll have to be careful to make sure I don’t hit you either. And maybe we can… switch? In a little bit? If the targets can move, or if there’s, I don’t know, projectiles, or…” She trails off.

It all sounds so _complicated._ Hitting things with a sword, faster and more precise than anyone else, _that’s_ how Felix operates. Simple.

But apparently the professor wants him to learn _people skills._ Ones that don’t involve hitting them with a sword.

“If that’s what you want,” he says, flat, and ignores Sylvain’s enthusiastic double thumbs-up.

They do his way first, and it’s harder than he anticipated. The hum and flash of magic behind him is bad enough, but then a _fireball_ will roar over his shoulder. The first time it does, he leaps aside out of habit, and Sylvain rushes in to tap Annette on the head with a smug _“boop.”_

The second time, Felix makes himself hold his ground. But he can read Sylvain’s face, his stance, to know where he’ll hit next—as long as it’s Felix. When Sylvain's mark shifts, though...

One dummy falls, then another. Sylvain glances over Felix’s head, behind him. He’s going to make a move for Annette—

—the sword switches trajectory, drives straight for Felix’s gut instead—

—Annette takes a third dummy out, and he hasn’t even managed to put Glenn down—_No, Sylvain—_

_Enough._

There’s a cold place in Felix, cold as winter, numb and empty and _clear._ When he goes there, he forgets everything that he’s fighting for, and when he fights, his enemy is a shadow that sounds like Glenn.

Felix wins every time.

Because that’s the only way Felix will _ever_ beat him: in his own head.

When Felix comes out of it, Sylvain is on the ground, and Felix’s sword is a finger above his heart, and both of them are wondering if he was going to stop in time.

“Need to take a break?” Sylvain wheezes.

The answer should be yes, because that was too much, too close, and he needs to collect himself, and there’s no point training on a broken bone—

“No,” Felix says, because in battle he _won’t_ have time, because he won’t have time to exorcise his ghosts.

Because he’ll be damned if he’ll admit any part of him is broken.

“Again,” says Felix.

He figures it out after that. Shut out the magic, shut out the falling dummies, focus on the close range. Make it a competition: defeat his enemy before Annette can take out three targets. Two targets. One. One. One.

“Let’s take a break,” Sylvain says finally, after his training sword windmills across the grounds for the fifth time in a row. “Then we’ll shake it up so Annette gets something useful out of this too.”

“How?” Felix wipes his brow. It’s getting close to noon, and the direct sunlight is merciless. He doesn’t know how Annette is still standing in a heavy black dress.

“Annette, how does this sound?” Sylvain leads them all over to the shade of the overhang. “We’ll put you in the middle of four targets, then Felix and I will charge you from opposite sides of the court. You’ll have to knock us down before we hit any of your targets.”

“That sounds great,” Annette says, collapsing onto a nearby bench. She undoes the high-necked collar on her dress and fans herself.

It’s… intriguing.

Felix looks away. “Why are you still in the monk class anyway?”

Sylvain clears his throat.

_People skills._ Felix makes himself add, “You’re at least as competent as Lysithea.”

That’s a nice thing to say. Right?

Annette is pursing her lips. “I haven’t finished the coursework. I could test out of it, but then I’ll have a gap. I’d rather be a really good monk first, _then_ take the mage exams.”

“Hmph.” Felix frowns, leaning against a column. Her aim and control have undeniably improved since Great Tree Moon; she hasn’t missed a single target today. But… “You don’t have to just rely on magic. You _did_ know how to use an axe when we first got here.”

Annette blinks up at him through her bangs. Enough of them are sticking to her forehead to look uncomfortable. “Wow, good memory,” she says, a little guarded. “But… I like the distance.”

“Why?” Felix can’t help but ask.

She ducks her head. “Because… then I don’t have to see it up close.”

“You can pretend you’re not killing someone,” he says harshly. _Damn_ if that doesn’t hit close to home. But he got over that bit of sentiment years ago. “They’re still dead. It doesn’t matter if you cut them in half with a sword or a spell.”

“Hey, now—” Sylvain starts.

Felix ignores him. “You think it changes anything to be long-range or short-range? Ask Ashe how he feels. At least_ I_ can look my enemies in the face when they die.”

Annette is staring at him, her face so pale even in this heat that for the first time, he notices a faint constellation of freckles over her cheeks. “Is that how you really feel?” she asks.

It sounds like an accusation.

“Why would I say it if it wasn’t?” he shoots back, not sure what he’s guilty of this time.

_“People skills,”_ Sylvain half-sings under his breath.

Felix doesn’t ignore him this time. “What, I should lie so you both feel better? Find someone else if that’s what you want. There is _one_ thing Garreg Mach can do for me, and that’s make me stronger. Battle is part of that. I’m not going to pretend that that means there aren’t casualties, I’m going to make sure I’m not one of them.” 

Sylvain gets that look on his face, like he’s creeping back into Big Brother mode, and it only pisses Felix off more. “Maybe this assignment is because the professor wants you to stop acting like you’re the only one of us on the battlefield.”

Felix pushes off from the column. “Maybe I’m the only one who _should_ be.”

“You know what, I’ve had enough of a break,” Annette announces suddenly, and her voice is high and tight as she gets to her feet. “I’m going to set up the targets.”

There’s a stiff silence as Sylvain helps her jam posts into the dirt, and Felix watches, and he feels like perhaps he could have used some tutoring in people skills after all.

_You’re never going to be the only one,_ Glenn tells him.

_Go away,_ Felix thinks back.

He should know better. Glenn’s been haunting him for years. _No. You want to be stronger than anything else so when you find people you want to protect, you can put yourself between them and the worst of the world, and know you can save them this time. But just because you put them behind you doesn’t mean they stay there. _

_It does,_ Felix thinks, _if I’m faster._

He takes his place on one end of the training ground, sun bearing down on them like its own kind of war machine. Annette stands in the middle of the targets, three-to-four paces from each. The edge of her range. She’ll have to be fast to stop him and Sylvain both.

“Ready?” Sylvain calls across the training ground. “And…go!”

Felix tears across the ground, sees the flash of a glyph—_not aimed at you, focus on your mark_—Sylvain drops with an _“oof”_—he swings for the target—

Light bursts from _behind _him.

Wind slams into his—_calves?_

Before he can process that he’s falling, the wind curves, lifting him up off his feet.

He has a glimpse of Annette, wind whipping those copper braids and that black dress, hand outstretched—

She’s looking him dead in the face. _Pointedly._

It's a strange thing to notice, but her eyes are a certain shade of blue. Not like the sea, not like the sky, not like anything in those sappy ballads. They're a cloudy kind of blue, like steel. Like a storm.

The second gust of wind hits, from the front this time.

Felix sees sky blue now, and blazing light, and then the air in his lungs is knocked out like dust from a rug and the ground is horrendously solid below his back.

He gasps for breath and tastes dirt.

_Behind him. _She cast the wind spell _behind_ him. And to shift direction like that requires control he hasn’t even _seen_ from Lysithea.

Damn it all, that was smart.

“Huh,” Annette says somewhere above him. “I guess I’m actually pretty prepared for this month’s mission. If you need me, I’m going to be baking with Mercie.”

Felix hears the doors of the training ground creak and slam. A shadow falls over him.

“I think you made her mad,” Sylvain says, holding out a hand. Felix takes it and lets himself be pulled up. He hasn’t been knocked on his ass like that in at least a year.

“Stupid assignment anyway,” he grumbles. Sylvain is looking at him funny. _“What.”_

“Nothing,” Sylvain lies.

What Felix doesn’t know is that Sylvain is revising his earlier assessment.

By Sylvain’s reckoning, Felix does not need _a_ girl.

Felix needs _that_ one.


	5. Verdant Rain Moon: Words and Deeds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all are too sweet. <3 thanks for all the love!

**Verdant Rain Moon: Words and Deeds**

Annette has never wanted the professor to be wrong more.

_It’s probably a distraction,_ the professor said. _The real mark is the Holy Mausoleum, _the professor said._ They’ll send a small force to break in while everyone’s focused on the archbishop,_ the professor said.

Professor Byleth got almost everything right. It _is _the Holy Mausoleum, it _is_ a distraction, and for the most part, it _is_ a small force, nothing the Blue Lions can’t handle…

…except for the enormous demon-knight-_thing_ in the middle of the room.

Suddenly, Annette is regretting _not_ training at every possible opportunity last month. The first and last and _only_ practice session she did with Felix, that seemed proof enough she was ready. And she _was._

For _bandits._

Not for—for—

“A great big fuck-off death knight,” Sylvain mutters. “What do we do, professor?”

How the professor isn’t scared witless is beyond Annette. Instead, her calm remains unfractured: “Your orders haven’t changed,” she says quietly. “Just don’t engage him. He doesn’t want a fight with us.”

“You want us to just _ignore_ the biggest threat here?” Felix’s voice rises in disbelief, scowling at Annette’s side.

“He’s not a threat unless we make him a threat. Stay away from him and focus on the objective. You have your orders.”

And at first, it works. It works a little _too_ well, even though they only practiced once: Felix rushes ahead to take on the nearest thieves, and she picks off the archers drawing aim on him. Faster enemies dart towards her, and he cuts them down, while she drops the second wave of warriors in armor too heavy for Felix’s blade.

If Felix ever laughed, _really_ laughed, she thinks he’d be laughing now. It’s almost dizzying, the look on his face between hunger and triumph, teeth bared in what could be a snarl, could be a smile.

They’re good at this. They’re _good_ together.

They’re—

Only a few tiles from the Death Knight.

The great horned helm turns to fix its burning stare on Annette.

She doesn’t realize she’s seized Felix’s sleeve until he yanks free. Both of them know exactly how this plays out.

“Don’t,” she almost begs, knowing she may as well be pleading with a feral cat.

The Death Knight is the biggest, worst thing on the field. That’s Felix’s _catnip._

They can still get away. He’ll let them go.

But if there’s anything Annette has learned about Felix (Mystery) Fraldarius, it’s that _letting go_ is not in his lexicon.

The Death Knight shifts, turning his mount to Felix. That’s enough of an unspoken threat. Felix charges.

And for a surreal, terrible moment, it looks like he might actually pull it off.

His blade is a silver blur, _he’s _an untouchable whirlwind of steel and leather, the monstrous creature is bellowing with first annoyance and then pain, and worst of all, Felix looks like he’s enjoying himself.

Annette knew he was good with a sword, better than most of the monastery (though he’s yet to take on the professor), but she hasn’t seen him like _this, _fighting his heart out against something that can give him a run for his money. It’s beautiful in an awful kind of way. He _is_ enjoying himself.

But there’s a crack in that joy, a kind of desperation.

Mercedes had told her: Felix was afraid to lose.

He’s made the monster bleed, the Death Knight can’t land a single swing of the scythe, and then—

His beast of a mount rears. Hooves catch Felix in the temple, _hard, _and he crashes to the stone.

And for a surreal, terrible moment, Annette thinks it might be over.

The Death Knight looks at her, and doesn’t move. Then he looks at Felix’s crumpled body on the tiles, and raises the scythe. The message is clear: She can still run.

Felix is the coldest, meanest jerk in the Blue Lions, and he doesn’t even _have _to be, he just _is._

But that doesn’t mean she’ll let him die, because she is Annette Fantine Dominic, and it turns out that _letting go_ is not in her lexicon either.

_“PROFESSOR!” _she screams, because _unlike_ Felix, she has absolutely no desire to win this fight alone.

Then, _upsettingly_ like Felix, she runs headlong at the Death Knight, the blazing lines of magic carving glyph after glyph in her wake.

* * *

“You know you owe Annette an apology,” Ingrid tells Felix the next day.

He blinks at her from the infirmary bed. His head hurts too much to really process the words; he was told he had a skull fracture and a concussion and, if he remembers correctly, a death wish, according to Professor Manuela.

“I don’t owe anyone anything,” he mutters. “Where is Manuela?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say drinking,” Sylvain answers from his post at the foot of Felix’s bed. “Probably because she told us students like you are the reason she drinks. She left some painkillers.”

Felix sees a neatly-folded paper with crushed powders lying on the bedside table. He tips the powder straight into his mouth.

Sylvain cringes, pours a glass of water from a nearby pitcher, and shoves it at him. “Here, you damn animal.”

Ingrid hasn’t moved from the other side of the bed. “I’m not kidding, Felix. You owe Annette. _A lot.”_

Felix swishes the water around his mouth to buy time. He has only the vaguest recollection of how he arrived here. They were fighting in the Holy Mausoleum; he may or may not have been gradually leading them towards the Death Knight because _you don’t just ignore the biggest threat on the field,_ and then—

He wasn’t strong enough.

“She lied and said the Death Knight attacked you first,” Ingrid says coldly. “Professor Byleth _explicitly _told us not to engage. You know you could have been expelled for disobeying orders?”

“Hmph,” he answers, because his head still hurts and because it’s too much to work through when every thought wobbles and twinges like it’s sprained. But they’re alone in the infirmary, so clearly the fight wasn’t that bad. “It doesn’t matter. I’m the only one who got hurt.”

“Annette was in that bed—” Sylvain points to the empty one on the other side of the room. “—until a few hours ago. She had to hold back the Death Knight on her own until Dimitri ran him off.”

All right, that gets under his skin. Felix’s brow furrows. “She had no business fighting him. She should have run.”

“So should you!” Ingrid bursts out. “She was holding him back from _killing you!”_

And he remembers it now, the best he can, because it’s a dizzy, sick blur: a dance of black fabric and red-gold hair and thunderous hooves and a cruel scythe, the hum and crackle of magic, the hiss and whimper as steel bites into her arm—

He was down, good as dead.

He wasn’t strong enough, and she protected him.

Felix doesn’t have the words. This time, it has nothing to do with the ache in his skull.

Ingrid is waiting for an answer, and he doesn’t have one to give her. “You’re such an asshole,” she spits, and storms out of the room.

There’s a long pause as Sylvain looks from Felix to the door and then back to Felix. Then he says, “I think we need to talk about your people skills.”

_“Shut up,”_ Felix snarls. Now is not the time.

Sylvain pulls up a chair and spins it around to sit backwards, folding his arms over the back. “I don’t mean picking up girls. I mean you genuinely don’t know how to act like you like people. And before you try some misanthropic _‘I don’t like people’_ BS on me, remember I knew you back when you were yelling about marrying Ingrid.”

Felix, who had been about to respond with _I don’t like people,_ scrambles for another answer. “I grew up. So what.”

“So what was the last nice thing you ever heard your father say about someone else?”

The painkillers aren’t working fast enough. Part of Felix knows they never would have worked on a question like that. “You know what it was,” he says to the wall.

_He died like a true knight._

“Okay,” Sylvain says swiftly, “well, we all can agree that that was shitty. Point is, your family doesn’t really _do_…small talk. You do big grand gestures or nothing at all. Deeds, not words, right?”

“Where is this going?” Felix is really hoping something in that powder knocks him out, and fast, because Sylvain is annoyingly right. His father doesn’t say he cares, he proves it. That’s how it works.

Sylvain leans back, running a hand through his hair. “What I’m trying to say is—sure, you can keep going on ignoring people until you decide you’ll die for them. But you can only die for someone _once._” His voice lowers. “I know you have this complex about being the strongest, and trust me, I know why—”

“You don’t know _anything,” _Felix hisses.

“—but someday you’re going to wish you’d told someone you care about them _before_ you went down in a blaze of glory,” Sylvain finishes. The ‘_Glenn didn’t, and look at the wreckage he left behind him,’ _is implied.

All Felix can think of is the blur and the storm of a girl he’d almost dragged into death himself, standing between him and another Fraldarius family tragedy.

“It’s really not that difficult,” Sylvain says after a moment. “Ask them about things they’re interested in. Point out what they’re good at. Just—_think_ about other people, Felix.” After a beat he sighs and gets up. “I don’t know why I’m talking about this with a head trauma patient. Sleep it off. And apologize to Annette.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Felix barks.

“Let’s make a deal, then.” Sylvain saunters to the doorway. “Apologize to Annette, and I won’t tell her you were singing some cute little ditty about _crumbs and yums_ in your sleep.”

Felix feels every drop of blood drain from his face.

“Deal? Deal.” Sylvain ducks out of the room.

And Felix is left to reckon with all of it: Ingrid’s rage, Sylvain’s miserably pointed words, the fact that he’d nearly lived up to his brother’s legacy after all.

It’s all too much. But what his aching head cannot wrap itself around, more than anything, is a simple fact.

He knows his name will not protect him. His father will not protect him. He has come to Garreg Mach to make up for that in strength.

But he almost died a day before.

And when he was lying on that cold ground, the world spinning before his eyes and death itself riding for him, strength did not protect him.

_Annette_ did.


	6. Horsebow Moon: Three Stars

**Horsebow Moon: Three Stars**

It takes Felix over a month to figure out how to apologize.

In his defense, Verdant Rain Moon was…not the best time. After they got the assignment for the month, an unspoken agreement was enacted between himself, Ingrid, and Dim—the boar; one of them is keeping an eye on Sylvain at all times.

Sylvain doesn’t frost over like Ingrid when he’s angry, and he doesn’t hide until the anger burns itself out like Felix, and he doesn’t work his rage out on a target like the boar. His anger poisons him from the inside, until he slips up and retches some bile on an unsuspecting target. So they all keep an eye on him, and herd him away when he gets a little too close to slipping up.

Felix is infuriated and—_sad?_ No, absolutely not—to find that they still make a good team, him and Ingrid and the boar.

Then, at the end of the month, Felix is sickened to watch Sylvain put a lance through Milkan’s heart. _Not_ because of the creature he has become, not because Sylvain looks like he wants to cry for the older brother who loathed him.

It’s because in that cold part of him, where Glenn’s invincible shadow is all he fights, Felix feels a poisonous twist of envy.

Sylvain pretends he’s fine after, but he slips again when Flayn goes missing, making a callous crack about chasing girls. Ingrid looks like she wants to strangle him, but her rebuke comes out tired instead of scathing.

Annette’s the one to bring up the Death Knight. Felix can’t blame her for worrying. There’s a scar on her arm now, hidden under her sleeve but always there. It’s a scar she shouldn’t carry. Not for his sake.

He needs to be stronger.

“Sounds intriguing,” Felix says, trying to sound as confident as if this is all one more exam to prep for. “I had been hoping to cross blades with him.”

Ingrid gets angrier, and she has no need to pull punches for him. She fires off something about Seteth and _feelings _and if not for Dimitri interrupting, Felix is sure she’d have personally torn his eyes out.

They’re all on edge. It feels like the days of mock battles and ratty bandits are behind them; this is all getting _personal._ Even the professor isn’t immune anymore, not with the Sword of the Creator glowing at her side, a conspicuous hole where the Crest Stone should sit, an even bigger hole in the stories about her past.

It feels like standing on the edge of a bone-dry forest at the end of summer, and waiting for lighting to start the wildfire.

The next day, Ashe is the one who puts it to words.

His aim hasn’t been quite the same since Lonato died, and he’s in the cathedral more often than not, staring at the altar like it can give him answers. Felix could have told him it won’t.

They’re sitting through another dreary tactics lecture—_what’s the point,_ Felix thinks, _when every battle is different, and you don’t know what you’ll do until you’re in it—_and Ashe’s hand goes up. He crumples a bit when Professor Byleth calls on him, then steels himself.

“What if… there’s no way to win a fight?” Ashe asks. “What are you supposed to do?”

Everyone in the Blue Lions classroom can hear in his voice that this isn’t just about tactics.

It’s about Lonato. It’s about Miklan. It’s about Duscur.

It’s about Glenn.

Professor Byleth sets down the chalk, thinking. After a moment, she walks to her desk and picks up a feather from a small pile of primaries waiting to be cut into quills. She lifts it into the air. “What will happen when I let go?”

“It’ll fall,” Annette answers. “We know gravity pulls objects towards the ground.”

“Can anything defeat gravity?” asks the professor. The class trades looks in varying flavors of _What the hell kind of question is that?_

Dedue speaks up this time. “Birds can, and other flying creatures.”

“Only for a time. But gravity wins in the end, doesn’t it?” The professor lets the feather go. It floats downward, twisting on the draft. “We all have to fight battles we can’t possibly win, every day. You get up in the morning and fight gravity, entropy, inertia, then you go to sleep and wake up and fight them all again. You’ll never beat them forever, but still you fight.” Suddenly her arm flashes, and the feather is in her grasp once more, caught before it could touch the ground. Then she lifts it and lets it go again. The feather waltzes into a fall. “Some wars you’ll never win. You just learn to live with the fight.”

Felix catches his breath.

The professor’s eyes rove over the classroom, lingering on each of them, and she catches the feather once more. “Just because you can’t win a fight,” she says, “doesn’t mean it isn’t worth fighting. The feather will always fall. But for the time that matters, the bird will fly.”

Felix sees some nods from his classmates.

It makes him want to kick the table over.

Instead, he waits until lecture is over and the classroom is _completely _empty before storming up the professor’s desk.

“That was a nice pep talk,” he snaps. “But some of us don’t have the luxury of losing.” _Not again._

The professor raises an eyebrow at him. “Then you should ask yourself what you’re willing to lose in order to win.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Professor Byleth picks up a knife and a pinion and sits, carefully beginning to cut a quill. “If you can’t win as you are now, then you need to adapt. To change. Change means growth, but it also means loss.” She holds up the feather, the bottom of its shaft now sharpened to a deadly point. “What parts of yourself will you cut away to change what you’re capable of?”

Felix folds his arms. He doesn’t really _do_ metaphors. “You’re the teacher. Tell me what I need to do.”

The professor sighs with a hint of an eye-roll, and it might just be the most emotion Felix has seen her display. For a moment, it’s a reminder that she’s almost their age, not some immortal and unknowable war-god.

She fishes in her desk, pulls out a file, pulls a paper from that file, slides it to him. It’s the results of his aptitude tests when he first came to Garreg Mach. “You’re sharp enough. Figure it out yourself.”

Felix does not figure it out.

A week into Horsebow Moon and Flayn is still missing, and he is still at a loss for what the professor meant, _and_ he has not apologized to Annette, and if he doesn’t do something about any of those he’s going to burn Garreg Mach to the ground.

The kicker is in the dining hall, when Sylvain—who is keenly aware he has not apologized to Annette—crosses Felix’s path, tray of onion gratin soup in hand, and jerks his chin at the girl. Felix shakes his head.

Sylvain does not see Annette look up at him. Nor does he see the look on Annette’s face when he mouths, _“crumbs and yums.”_

Annette turns very pale, then very red, and then whispers furiously to Mercedes, looking miserable. Felix’s stomach twists. He could go explain—but they’re in the middle of the dining hall, and someone might overhear, and he’d have to explain _why_ Sylvain was threatening him with her song, and then he might have to admit that for the last month, that damn song has been skulking around his skull like—

No. _Unacceptable._

It can wait.

Annette, however, apparently cannot.

Felix is in his room when the soft knock barely rattles the door. He scowls. Whoever it is, they’ve managed to catch him in one of the rare times he’s actually here studying.

When he yanks the door open, he’s the teensiest bit sucker-punched to find Annette outside, bouncing on her toes.

_Say something charming,_ Glenn prompts.

“Uh,” Felix says.

“Um,” Annette says back, and they are officially at a stalemate.

The longer she stands out there, the greater the odds Sylvain sees, and Felix knows that he’ll never hear the end of it. “Come in.”

Annette looks nervous as the door shuts behind her. _Of course she does,_ his brother’s voice scolds._ The two of you are alone in your room. You may be a stone cold bastard, but even _you_ know what that looks like. What a risk that is for her._

A rush of heat runs up the back of his neck. Part of him hopes she doesn’t… think of him like that kind of risk.

Part of him wonders why he cares.

Annette fidgets, getting redder by the moment, until she finally blurts out, “So, uh, it was your turn to clean out the greenhouse, right?”

He frowns, running through the list in his head. “…Yes.”

“Well, I went ahead and took care of it.”

Felix stares at her, baffled.

“I also cleaned up the warehouse.”

That’s his job this evening. But…_he’s_ supposed to be apologizing, not the other way around._ “Why?”_

“I just wanted to...help you out...so that... Okay, fine! I'm bribing you. So you'll forget!”

It clicks into place. She thinks he’s going to rat her out about the singing. But this is classic Annette, going overboard over such a silly thing; maybe he can play the fool. “Forget what?”

That has the opposite effect. Annette looks even more upset. “Are you really going to make me say it? Before! In the greenhouse. I want you to forget what you saw and heard. If you agree to forget about it, I'll take your shift in the stables. Do we have a deal?”

Abruptly, Felix has gone from dragging around an emotional debt for six weeks to an embarrassment of riches. But it’s not right. He _owes_ her, and it’s all a misunderstanding, and if he were Sylvain he’d know how to talk his way out of this, but the Fraldariuses don’t talk, they _do. _

What had Sylvain said about talking to people? _Point out what they’re good at. Ask them what they’re interested in. Just _think_ about other people, Felix._

If he were Annette… She’s always busy. She has no business trying to pick up extra chores.

“No thanks,” Felix says.

And that _immediately_ backfires. Annette looks like she’s going to cry. “No?! But that's not okay! You have to forget about it! Right this moment!”

Felix Hugo Fraldarius does not panic. Even in the face of mortal peril, he is the cold north, he is the steady stone, he is the winter.

But if he _did_ panic, he suspects it would feel a lot like the way he feels now.

It’s fine.

It’s _fine._

He just has to try… pointing out what Annette’s good at? The fact that he still remembers it means it’s a good song, right? “I can't. It's permanently etched in my memory. A mountain of sweets, as well as steaks and cakes. Stacks of them, apparently.”

It’s Annette’s turn to stare at him.

“I'm also intrigued by those bear and swamp beastie songs you mentioned.” Silence. Felix tries again. “Ah, and I've been to ask about the move that went along with ‘crumbs and yums.’ Was that fencing footwork?”

_“Stop_ it, Felix! You’re a villain!” Annette’s eyes glitter—not with tears, but with a manic kind of outrage.

“Hm?” On the outside, Felix is maintaining his standard-issue icy calm. On the inside, he is swearing a blood oath to never listen to Sylvain ever again.

“You think you're so funny?” Annette sputters, and Felix wonders for a moment if perhaps he should have left the door open for his _own_ safety. “Keeping a straight face while mocking my singing and dancing! Well, you _have _to forget about it. Please!” Then she executes a perfect hairpin turn in tactics. “What if I make you a nice steak dinner? You like steak, don't you, Felix? It will be yummy.”

Somehow, the idea that she thinks he’s mocking her is… dismaying. He _likes_ her singing and dancing. “This isn’t about steak, I just—”

Felix isn’t quite sure what happens next, only that there’s a lot of angry yelling, and it ends in her running out of his room, swearing she’ll hate him forever.

“I was just trying to be nice,” he mutters, and is halfway through a grumble about bullies and the infinite mystery of girls when a flash of red catches his eye in the doorway.

It’s not the redhead he wants to see.

Sylvain gives him a leering, sardonic grin, and two thumbs up. _“Nailed _it, buddy.”

“She thought I was making fun of her.” Felix runs a hand down his face.

“Honestly? I probably would too.”

“Shut _up,”_ Felix growls. This is _precisely _why he doesn’t bother with trying to win people over with words. Things with Annette are even more of a disaster now and _why does it matter so much—_

His eyes land on a piece of paper on his desk, and it’s one more thing he can’t figure out: why the professor gave him his aptitude test results. They’re months old, and they won’t tell him anything about his strengths _now—_

There are three stars in one row. He’s skimmed over it before, because it doesn’t really mean anything, it just notes he did well in tests that are an indicator for that subject. It’s a subject he’s never had any interest in pursuing.

Until now.

Felix has never been _great_ at math, just passable, but even he can solve for solve for _Y_ on this equation.

“I have to go,” he tells Sylvain, and takes off before Sylvain can get in another word.

* * *

After spending some time in consideration (roughly as much as it takes to walk down the hall from Felix’s room, down the stairs, back to her own room, and then lie face-down on the floor) Annette has decided on a healthy and reasonable outlet for her stress: standing on the end of the dock and screaming into the fishpond.

She yanks her door open—

—and finds Felix standing there, fist raised to knock.

_Say something scathing,_ the steely part of her commands.

“Um,” she says.

“Uh,” Felix says back.

_Déjà vu. _“What do you want?” Annette tries to strike the balance between angry-tough-lady and… well, groveling-teen-girl-who-doesn’t-want-her-goofy-songs-all-over-the-monastery. The exact midpoint of those two, it turns out, is a squeak on ‘want.’

Felix takes a deep breath. “I need to say something.”

Since when does _Felix _open with a warning shot, instead of going straight for the kill? Annette nods, jaw tight, and braces herself.

The words pour from him in a rush, in the kind of stuttering way that says he’s thought through the bones of this a _lot,_ and the rest is just messy raw gristle to string it together.

“When you fought the Death Knight last month…” Felix looks away and starts again. “You _shouldn’t_ have fought the Death Knight. It was stupid to take him on yourself.”

Annette starts to shut the door in his face.

_“Wait—”_ Felix catches it. “I mean—what I’m trying to say is—_you’re_ not stupid. You knew better. It’s my fault you got hurt, and it would have been my fault if you died.”

It’s been six weeks, two days, and five hours since they fought the Death Knight, and Annette would say this apology is six weeks, two days, five hours, and five minutes overdue. But at least Felix finally has the right idea.

“I should have been stronger,” he says.

Well, _something_ like the right idea.

But she’s not letting him off the hook just yet. “If you’re so sorry, why did you tell Sylvain about—about—you know, in the greenhouse?”

“I didn’t.”

“He was saying _crumbs and yums_.”

Months from now, Annette will learn that Felix has a tell, and it’s a muscle that jumps in his throat when he lies. For the moment, she remains oblivious, and doesn’t _not_ believe Felix when he says, “It was…something else.”

She gives him a skeptical look.

Something eerily like panic flashes through Felix’s face, and he clears his throat, finally letting go of the door. “Uh… ask Sylvain when you’re older.”

Annette turns bright red and covers her face with her hands. _“Ew! _I don’t know what it is but I’m grossed out on principle! Why are you telling me this?!”

“You asked!” Felix runs fingers through his dark hair, looking shockingly flustered. _“Anyway._ I wasn’t trying to make fun of you earlier. And stop doing my chores. I need to ask you a favor.”

Today has been a very strange day for Annette, and she can’t say what’s made it stranger: that Felix thinks she can do him a favor, or that he wasn’t making fun of her. _“What?”_

“You said earlier you heard rumors about the Death Knight, right?” Felix looks dead at her this time.

Of course, he wants a rematch. At the end of the day it’s still about his pride. “Yeah,” Annette sighs.

“If he’s the one who kidnapped Flayn, we _have_ to bring him down, using whatever it takes.” Felix doesn’t seem to notice her surprise—he’s actually concerned for Flayn? _Felix?—_and instead he takes another deep breath. The words burst from him like a dam breaking: “Will you help me with Reason?”

If Felix were the type to pull elaborate pranks, this is where Annette would hold up her hands and say _right, you really had me going._ As it is, she can’t help sneaking a look around for a familiar golden cape, because a long con like this is _absolutely_ Claude’s game.

But all she sees is Felix, with an awkward, determined blaze in his face, like he’s every bit as braced for the worst as she is.

The idea is horrendously dissonant. She squints at him. “But…you do…_swords.”_

“I do _winning,”_ he answers. “It doesn’t matter what my weapon is.”

“It won’t be fast,” Annette finds herself saying, “you’re supposed to spend a year just on theory, and—well, I guess we’re halfway through, but that doesn’t… What I mean is, I can help you with theory, but it’ll still take a few months before you can actually cast anything. And you won’t be good right away, it takes a lot of practice.”

He nods, and she wouldn’t say he’s smiling so much as the edges of his mouth have migrated slightly north. “I know. I saw you.” Then he coughs. “And it’s not as if I just woke up _doing swords,_ like you say. I had to work then too.”

“Then I guess… yeah.” Why is she agreeing to this? _Why is she agreeing to this?_ “I can help you.”

Felix looks like he’s also asking himself _Why is she agreeing to this? _“Oh. Good. That’s… all I had to say.”

“Ah. Well. Good, then.” Annette is in no shape to perform the five-step dismount this conversation requires.

Neither, it seems, is Felix. “Good.”

“Okay.”

“Right.” He ducks his head. “I should go. Uh. Tomorrow?”

“What time?” Annette asks warily. She’s not about to sign up for another nebulously-all-day training session.

But all Felix says is, “Whatever works for you. You know where I’ll be.”

And then he’s gone.

Annette decides he really is like a cat: uncannily good at showing up on your doorstep when you don’t want him around… and in an odd, unsettling way, almost charming once he’s there.

(Almost.)


	7. Wyvern Moon: Patterns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay, all! houseguests = cleaning + local guide + general maintenance, so it's been a busy few days. but thanks for 1000 hits! I hope you're all having fun!

**Wyvern Moon: Patterns**

It doesn’t start easy.

On a purely emotionless level, Felix knows he is a novice in this, that _yes_ he can repeat the theorems and laws and principles behind magic on paper, but memorization is not understanding, and Annette—who does not do anything by halves—will never let them build on a cracked foundation.

But it’s _humiliating._

He knows the answers to recite to pass the tests, but when she pushes for actual comprehension… there are corrections to make. Basic, simple things. It feels like being taught how to hold a sword, _now, _at seventeen.

It feels…exposed.

Their first session is awkward and strained, in the library where everyone can see and hear, and he cuts it short with an excuse about stable duty. And she notices. Annette solves for that variable faster than he’d like, because of _course_ she can, what was he _thinking_, that all that studying was for show?

At the end of that day, he gives himself a week before he declares this all a waste of his time and moves on—

_Before you run away,_ Glenn’s memory chides. _At least Father never let you run away from sword training._

But then for the second session, unprompted and _certainly_ unasked, Annette makes…adjustments.

She moves them to the corner of the Blue Lions classroom, between dinner and the optional evening lectures, and though others can wander in and out, they don’t have an accidental audience.

When he’s still getting flustered and angry with his errors, she puts a hand on the worksheet and waits until he looks up at her.

“My uncle made me feel awful every time I messed up on _anything_,” she tells him. “And all it did was make me scared of messing up again, and then all I did was make more mistakes.”

“Mistakes on the battlefield get people killed,” Felix answers, discomfort stitching through his ribs.

She shakes her head. “That’s why we’re making them here. I thought I was bad at—a lot of things. Then my favorite teacher at the School of Sorcery told me it was fine if I didn’t get it right away, that’s what practice is for. And since I wasn’t as nervous, I could focus better, and I messed up less.”

“Hmph,” says Felix, because he was not raised to do anything less than perfect. Because he was raised to do it right, and do it the _first _time.

But she keeps breezing through his slips, his fumbles, correcting the symbols in his glyphs and explaining why the formulas won’t parse out, talking to him like he already knows these things, like—

Like she already thinks he’s good enough for this.

This isn’t like the training courts, where he’s never truly going to know if Glenn would make those mistakes, if he’s ever going to be as good as his brother was with a blade.

_If you’ll be good enough to stay alive when I couldn’t,_ the shadow of Glenn whispers from his cold, cold home in Felix’s bones.

But he’s not chasing shadows with magic. Annette talks to him like he’s already caught up. Like she knows his mistakes because she’s made them herself.

From then on, Felix can’t help it: he breathes a little easier around her.

And then he finds himself around her more and more.

It happens too easily when they have to scramble below the monastery and cobble together a strategy out of who has shown up with a weapon in hand. Felix, of course, is armed. Annette is fresh off passing her Mage certification exams, with a rumored perfect score.

Without Dimitri, they have to fight _smart, _instead of hurling the boar straight into the biggest group of enemies and waiting to see if any of them last more than one round with him.

The Death Knight is there, and Dimitri is not, and Felix can see how gray Annette has gone but she’s still willing to charge in if it means saving Flayn. And that is when Felix decides he’s willing to charge in if it means keeping _her_ intact.

(He still has work to do in Reason, after all. It’s just science.)

And when the professor splits the class up to cover both sides of the labyrinth, he falls in with Annette, almost a little too easily.

And they fall into the rhythm of the last time they faced the Death Knight—him: short range, her: incoming infantry, him: any stragglers who make it through, her: long range, repeat, repeat, repeat—a little too easily.

And every enemy they face falls, a little too easily, and after a blur of warp tiles and broken walls—they’re staring down the Death Knight. Flayn lies crumpled on the ground behind him, still and pale.

It’s just the two of them and the monster in the room. They have to fight _smart._

It’s lucky, Felix thinks, that he’s with the smartest girl in Garreg Mach.

Annette is beside him, furious, the hems of her uniform stirring in an arcane wind. By now, she’s taught him the hallmarks of incoming magic, the weathervanes pointing before the cyclone touched down; his ears pop as the air pressure rises and falls.

He’s never seen her like this.

This time, Felix is the one to grab her sleeve before she does something rash. Only the two of them have made it into this inner sanctum, the professor still rushing through warp tiles and the rest of the class still mired in fights with the cultists. It’s hard to say if the Death Knight remembers them, but his burning eyes seem to flicker in recognition.

Annette is shaking, she is terrified, and he knows that fear because he’s spent every day in the training room trying to cure himself of it. Fear hamstrings you in battle; you don’t move so fast around an opponent you aren’t sure you can beat. And they both know how the last fight with the Death Knight played out.

Annette is terrified, but she isn’t backing down.

“You sure?” he asks.

“I’m ready,” she answers, with a storm in her voice that sounds like the winter in him. He believes her, and draws his sword.

They don’t beat the Death Knight.

He vanishes with the Flame Emperor long before it gets dire. But there’s something intoxicating about that fight, something that makes it almost a dance—

—he lunges and the sword sweeps and _pivot—_

—she twirls and the wind whips from her like a flourish, _right_ where she knew he’d push the Death Knight to—

—and _glide_ and _back_ and _spin_ and—

The Death Knight flees. He flees from _them,_ a couple of first-years, both still catching their breath and a little drunk on how easy it was, how good that was, _together._

Felix still wants to fight the Death Knight one-on-one someday, of course. Just to know he can. But there’s no question in his mind: even if the professor hadn’t shown up, even if it was just him and Annette, they would have won.

And when the professor takes the post-battle reports, and takes stock of the conspicuous lack of mortal wounds on the two students who had faced the Death Knight alone and sent him running…

From that day on, whenever the professor looks at him and Annette, it’s with a speculative glint in her eye.

Neither Felix nor Annette are surprised when they’re paired up for the Battle of the Eagle and Lion.

(The rest of the class: even less surprised. Both Felix and Annette think their extra study sessions for Reason are fairly mundane, that there’s little salacious about spending an hour every other day working through dry equations and theorems and principles. It’s just science.

Virtually every other member of the Blue Lions, however, has noticed that Felix has stopped storming/sneaking out of lectures, that Annette’s binder of practice exercises and mock spells for him is even more meticulously organized than the one she’s made for herself, that he _crackles_ a little less with her, that she doesn’t spend nearly as much time haunting the Knight’s Hall for a glimpse of gray-streaked copper hair.

There is a robust betting pool now. There are _brackets. _Dimitri has claimed ‘They attend the Grand Ball together’; Sylvain has claimed ‘caught messily making out in the library before Guardian Moon.’

Mercedes, shrewd as always, has claimed ‘they remain in complete and utter denial and spend the rest of the year pining.’ It’s not that she’s a pessimist. She just understands both of them better than most.)

It’s easy, easy, easy. Felix and Annette work through Reason every other day, so once a week they flip a session and meet on the training grounds to prep for the Battle of the Eagle and Lion.

Easy: she lingers after, and they commiserate over the insufferable way Sylvain just _picks up_ spells and sword maneuvers like he’s known them all his life, instead of working through them again and again. She may breathe arcane formulas like Felix breathes swords, but they speak the same language here: practice, dedication, determination.

Easy: he avoids asking after Gustave. The former Baron Dominic helped them put down Miklan, and has been little more than one more monastery ghost since, and Felix sees Annette’s knuckles whiten every time someone calls him _Gilbert. _She and Felix work well in combat, she’s helping him pick up new skills, but they are not friends. He doesn’t have the words to navigate those shoals, and she seems relieved for a distraction from those waters.

Easy: night after night, he walks back to his room, taking the route by the greenhouse even though it’s getting chillier now and he could cut through the upstairs. He tells himself it’s because he is House Fraldarius, he was born into winter, the south’s version of cold is a joke. It’s viable enough an excuse to plaster over the heart of it.

Night after night, he spots the light at Annette’s door, still burning.

And he breathes a little easier.

* * *

Annette does not know what to say to her mother.

The blank parchment yawns before her, accusing, even as she hears Felix’s quill scratching across his own paper. His work is easier, though, solving for variables while she has to write a terrible theorem from scratch.

She’d told her mother about the mission to take down Miklan…with adjustments.

Her father had acted like she was invisible. That became: _Father was very focused on the mission. _Her father had put Dimitri’s safety first and foremost. That became: _He remains as loyal to the royal family as ever._

Most of the monastery knows she and Felix faced the Death Knight head-on and sent him packing. Her father, who she’s seen marching down walkways and around the market, has not troubled himself to ask her about the fight.

Annette has not puzzled out how to tell her mother about that.

It takes her a moment to realize Felix is looking at her.

“Sorry?” Annette blinks up from the parchment. “I, uh. Was thinking.”

Suddenly he looks anywhere _but_ her. “I didn’t say anything,” he says in a rush, pauses, _chewing_ over his words, then adds, “you just…looked…angry.”

It’s not an invitation, and Annette appreciates that more than she knows how to say, because when people ask about her father, she has to run the numbers on _how much do I trust them_ and _how much do they really care._

It’s an open door. She can pass it by, and they’ll keep on going about their studies just fine. But if she steps in, she can still decide exactly how far into that place she’ll go.

Felix, who probably wouldn’t admit a weakness with a knife to his throat, who would spit every time someone said Rodrigue’s name if he could, knows this place like she does. That’s why he opened the door.

She sets her quill and parchment down and tries to pry words out of the grain of the table planks. “My mother wanted to know how things are here. Including with… Father.”

There’s a slow, harsh breath from Felix, and a rustle as he shifts, tilting back on his chair legs. “He’s not writing to her himself?”

“He hasn’t written to _any _of us since Duscur,” Annette admits.

The chair legs bang down on the stone. _“What?”_

There’s a pattern in the wood grain, loop within loop within loop. Annette digs into it with a fingernail. This is treacherous territory: she lost her father four years ago, but in a far less permanent way than Felix lost his brother. “He just…disappeared on us. My uncle said he felt like he failed the royal family. I figured out where he would have gone, and I was right, so I got into the Officers’ Academy, but…”

“I figured he was playing some stupid penitence game,” Felix hisses, and it feels _so good_ to hear someone else call it stupid, “but to throw away your family—” He cuts himself off, then his voice rises. “They have a duty to us_._ Why doesn’t that _ever_ come first?”

It’s so familiar, that resentment, comforting and rancid, like a smelly old scarf wrapped around her neck a little too tight.

“I don’t know,” she says, a little hoarse.

“My old man acts like we’re all just toys for House Blaiddyd.” Felix’s teeth are bared. “Like I’m supposed to die for that boar if he wants me to. He cared more about Lambert dying than his own son. And then he just replaced Glenn with a beast.”

Annette has gone very still.

There’s a sharpness to this moment, one she’ll remember the rest of her life: his eyes blazing with wrath and old wounds, locked on something long-distant, longer-dead. And there’s a current to this moment, like the moment between lightning and the roll of thunder.

She has not thought of herself as Felix’s friend.

But this is Felix, who would not admit a weakness with a knife to his throat. And this is Felix, clearly opening a vein in front of her.

“You deserve better than that,” she says. And it’s the truth: loyalty to the crown is well and good, but not at this cost. Not when they were never given a choice in paying it.

Felix looks up at her, and for a moment, he is wholly, utterly speechless.

It’s not the kind of resonance of a truth you’ve known but waited for someone else to say aloud. It’s the lightning strike of a truth you _didn’t_ know until someone said it, one you feel in your bones.

He ducks his head and mumbles, “So do you.” Then he clears his throat. “Forget about your father. You’re doing fine on your own.”

Annette winces, and thinks of a wooden doll on her shelf. “We were so happy before he left, living in Fhirdiad. And now he looks so—sad. If I can bring him home…”

“He doesn’t deserve your pity,” Felix says savagely.

“He doesn’t,” she agrees. Every word is a thorn on her tongue. “But he’s my father. I have to try.”

_“Why?”_ he demands. “Because he’s family?”

“Because I think he made a mistake,” she answers. “And I think he knows it too. So maybe, someday, we can fix it.”

Felix almost seems to crackle at that. Then it subsides, muffled under something stiff and bewildered.

“I… have to go,” he says, standing up and shoving papers into his bag.

“Felix,” she starts. Annette has the distinct feeling that she—hasn’t said the wrong thing, no, that’s not it. It’s the flash of that same look: it’s a truth he didn’t know until she said it.

“I forgot I told Sylvain I’d train with him.” A muscle jumps in Felix’s throat.

She’s noticed that tick a few times now. She’s starting to see a pattern.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” Maybe by then she’ll have figured out what to tell her mother.

Felix nods, and walks out of the classroom iron-faced.

Annette isn’t sure if he’s speaking to himself, or to her, or to both of them, or if she’s imagined it entirely, when a final mutter skates across the stones: _“He doesn’t deserve _you.”


	8. Red Wolf Moon: Notes

**Red Wolf Moon: Notes**

Years and years and years ago, there was a single perfect day.

Felix was seven? Six? Young enough that the memories blur like watercolor, the pigments seeping into one another and spilling over lines.

It was nearly midsummer, and there was no war. There was a picnic at his mother’s favorite waterfall. Dimitri was there (and still Dimitri, not the boar) and Glenn was there (and still Glenn, not an empty suit of armor in a crypt) and Sylvain and Ingrid and Felix, the five of them were running around in a rousing reenactment of _Loog and the Maiden of the Wind,_ except Ingrid wouldn’t be the Maiden of the Wind, so Sylvain had made a wimple of a napkin and done his best.

The rest of the roles were assigned with similar chaos: Glenn and Felix had a brief and cheerful tussle over who was Kyphon and who was Pan, and concluded they would _both_ be _both,_ and then Ingrid and Dimitri were somehow _both_ Loog, and somehow the climactic battle was relocated to the shallow end of the waterfall’s pool, and their parents were laughing, and Father looked at him and Glenn and he was _so proud._

When Annette said she had to try to fix her family, Felix wished that idea had been utterly foreign to him. He wished he could dismiss it as a fantasy, that what was broken was dead weight, that the only choice was to cut himself free and move on.

He’s been sawing at that dead weight for years.

And the quiet, unrelenting resolve in Annette’s face had told him why he’d never quite managed to break that tie.

If the goddess Sothis descended before Felix and told him he could have that perfect day, if he could have his friends and his brother and his mother as she’d been and the father he thought Rodrigue was—in a heartbeat. He’d go back in a heartbeat, no matter the cost.

He hates it. It’s a fantasy. And Annette is too smart to lie to herself that it’s possible.

But she hasn’t given up.

That’s exactly what drove him out that night: the dissonance and the recognition. He knows _why_ she wants to try to salvage her family, he knows that bitterly well.

But _how?_

_How_ does she keep going? _How_ can she believe it’s even possible?

_How_ did she lose her father, _how_ does she keep chasing the empty armor he’s become, without…

_Without becoming like you,_ Glenn finishes.

Felix can’t stop thinking about it. And when he does, he hears a song. He sees an ungainly dance. It’s nonsense. It’s cheerful. It’s _defiant._

And no matter how he tries, he cannot evict it, or her, from the back of his skull.

Felix catches himself in the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, which is going…_fine._ He’s shoving his way through a group of Black Eagle foot soldiers, and each swing and thrust of his sword is a seamless liquid blur, and—

He’s fallen into a rhythm. Not just any rhythm.

_“Oh this mounTAIN”—_crash—_“of SWEETS”_—block—“_and treats that I LONG”-_lunge-“_TO”-_lock hilts-“_EATS”-_snap—

_Get it together, Fraldarius._ The voice sounds like his own. It sounds like Father. It sounds like Glenn.

Felix does not get it together.

He follows his orders, goes where the professor tells him, because he can grudgingly admit she knows what she’s doing. Annette falls in with him, just as planned, and together they sew up Caspar and his forces, and it’s fine. It’s just _fine_ because he’s fighting his own head half the time, forcing himself into any other rhythm than one that involves steaks and cakes.

Annette makes up for it, deft as ever with her spells, and some might even call her shout of _Ready or not!_ downright gleeful as she bowls Ferdinand _(von Aegir)_ over with a well-placed gust of wind.

She’s not just in top form, she’s putting on a show, and every once in a while Felix catches her sneaking a glance up to the crest of the hill where the faculty are watching.

Right. Of course. Gustave could be watching, and even if he isn’t… other knights may take word back to him.

The drummer units roll out a signal to converge. That means the other units have successfully put down the Golden Deer, and now the Blue Lions can close their jaws on the remains of the Black Eagles.

Felix doesn’t even have to check to make sure Annette is next to him as they sprint across Gronder field, towards Edelgard’s stronghold. The princess is waiting, axe in hand—but a streak of blue says the boar will beat them there.

Linhardt ducks out from behind the stronghold, takes one look at the charge of Prince Dimitri, and with a blasé _“nope”_ turns his focus on Felix and Annette.

A sear of blazing white nearly sends Felix to the dirt, and he feels worn to the bone, like he hasn’t slept in a week. _Nosferatu._ His _least_ favorite spell they’ve studied. There’s something nauseating about the idea of another person breathing in his life like that.

Annette has already prepped a counter, the Dominic Crest igniting before her, and the comet streaks of _Sagittae _knocks Linhardt back. (And of course Linhardt looks surprised; it’s a spell they’re not supposed to get to until later in the semester. Felix is allergic to class pride, but he will allow himself the tiniest bit of smugness for having a mage who does more than read and nap.)

He may be exhausted, but he’s spent years training himself past the point of exhaustion for times like this. Felix closes the distance and knocks Linhardt out cold with the pommel of his sword.

Close by, he hears a furious exchange of blows. Edelgard is holding Dimitri off, just barely.

There’s an animal gleam in his eyes.

The professor is running towards them, Ingrid swooping nearer on her pegasus, Sylvain is galloping across the field, Ashe is notching an arrow, Mercedes is readying a healing glyph—

And Felix knows none of them will be able to stop the boar when he shows his tusks.

Edelgard says something fierce and quiet, and the moment passes. Dimitri steadies out. With a swift twist of the lance, Edelgard’s axe rips from her hands and falls to the earth out of reach.

The Battle of the Eagle and Lion is over.

There’s applause, there are cheers, but it’s all noise to Felix.

Everyone on this field knows something’s changing this year. That what happened with Flayn, what happened with Lonato and the Western Church, it’s not normal. Garreg Mach, Lady Rhea, they can keep playing these games and keeping up appearances, but…something’s in the wind. And when that hurricane makes landfall…

Felix has seen the professor speaking with students in other houses, inviting them to tea, asking about their interests, adjusting her own training. He’s seen Marianne and Bernadetta both eyeing the Blue Lions classroom when they think no one’s looking.

They’re likely to be the first of many, because when that hurricane lands, the professor is going to do her damnedest to get them all to high, dry ground.

Annette stumbles at his side.

There’s an immediate and awkward trade of fumbling grasps—he tries to seize her elbow and she automatically grips his forearm and Felix does not, _absolutely does not_ feel the slightest of jolts in his stomach that she reached for him, _nope—_and Annette catches her balance again.

“Where are you injured?” he asks brusquely.

She shakes her head, and despite the sun overheard and the sweat beading her hairline, she’s parchment-pale and shaking. “Just…got close to my limit.”

It’s a concept they’ve been over: there’s only so much magic the human body can channel over a short period of time before it simply gives out. Annette’s usually good at managing that, selecting each spell with an eye on the next five moves on the board.

But she had something to prove today.

_It’s not worth it,_ he wants to tell her. _He’s not worth it, and you can’t change him._

Instead he shifts his hold so she can lean on him and grumbles, “I’m not doing this again.”

Years from now, as they hobble over Gronder Field together, Felix will discover he was wrong about that, and right about everything he wished he wasn’t.

* * *

Red Wolf Moon brings a haze down on Garreg Mach. Even Professor Byleth looks off her game, bracing herself on her desk more frequently, a feverish glaze in her eyes. There’s an illness going around, and the Blue Lions have been warned to be ready to deploy if things in Remire Village get bad enough.

On some level, Annette knows she’s getting sick too.

She simply _refuses_ to admit it.

So _maybe_ she overdid it at the Battle of the Eagle and the Lion. Maybe a little. Maybe she wore the summer version of the Mage uniform, which was made of linen instead of the winter uniform’s sturdy wool, because she moves easier in the lighter fabric. Maybe she lingered a little too long after the fight, waving Felix off with an excuse about finding hot cider _(a complete and utter lie) _and helping clean up the field and the camp well into the twilight chill, desperate for even a mention of her father, even if they called him Gilbert now.

All she got for her effort was a scratch in her throat.

_Allergies,_ she tells herself, and keeps going to class.

Somewhere between target practice on the cold training grounds and mucking out stalls, that scratch becomes an ache. Maybe it’s when her father passes through the stables, glances her way, then hurries on without a word.

Annette rushes from the stall—or tries to. She trips over the pitchfork and lands in soiled straw. When she pushes herself up, there’s a long streak of dung on her school uniform jacket. She yanks it off and tosses it aside, then runs out of the stable, calling, _“Father!”_

He’s nowhere to be seen.

Annette’s throat blisters, and part of it is what she’s now calling _a mild case of sniffles,_ and most of it is frustration.

She leaves her jacket off for the rest of stable duty despite the cold, blinking back furious tears.

When Annette comes into class the next day, she misses her classmates trading uncertain looks, because she just drops into a seat and rests her head in her arms. Everything is in a fog. She’s cold. She’s on fire. She wants her mother to bring her soup.

She wants her father to just say _hello._

A soft hand brushes her cheek. “Annie,” Mercie says, unsurprised but dismayed, “you’re burning up.”

_I know,_ Annette wants to say. “I’ll be fine,” she answers instead.

Mercie hums a little and smooths Annette’s bangs back from her forehead. “I think you should see Professor Manuela.”

“Maybe after lunch,” Annette mumbles into her arms. Notes. She has to take notes. She has to pay attention to lecture. She has to keep up, she has to stand out, she can’t lose Father again—

It feels like she blinks, and the rest of the class has gathered around her seat. Something’s different about the light. It’s the wrong angle.

It’s much closer to noon, and her notebook is open, and there’s nothing but a few unintelligible scribbles in there. She barely remembers snapping out of the haze to write what she could.

_Useless,_ she thinks. Her notes are useless. It’s… it’s all useless.

“…very sick, Annette.” Professor Byleth is crouching by her, peering into her face. “I’m sending you to Manuela. Can you stand?”

Annette pushes her chair back, wobbles to her feet—then lurches sideways. She collides with something solid and warm, dissolving into a coughing fit. Arms slip around her from behind, steadying her as if they’ve had practice.

There’s a whiff of pine needles, and she knows it somehow.

Distantly, she hears a flurry of voices and movement, and then someone picks her up like she’s just one more of her father’s little dolls.

Cobalt blue floods her vision.

“I apologize for the lack of propriety,” Dimitri says, far away. “We’ll be at the infirmary shortly.”

“My notebook,” she croaks, craning to peer around his shoulder. _Your Highness._ She should call him that. That’s what she’s supposed to call him. Her throat hurts too much to force out the words.

Felix is standing by her empty chair, looking at her sparse, messy notes.

Annette has a very muddled and confusing thought.

Dimitri is a prince, he is _her_ prince, and there’s a degree of fairytale charm to him gallantly whisking her away.

But some surprising part of her is—disappointed? Yes, disappointed! She’s _disappointed _it’s him.

_What’s wrong with me? _What kind of self-respecting boy-loving citizen of Faerghus is let down to find themselves in the arms of the _prince?_

She’s delirious. She has to be.

Dimitri does not smell like pine needles.

Why does she wish he did?

Professor Manuela makes some kind of comment about the pleasant surprise of a student visitor who _hasn’t_ injured themselves in a horrific and entirely preventable way. Then she saps the pain from Annette’s throat, mixes a few doses of some heady-smelling syrup, and orders Annette to stay in her room for three days and pray to the goddess she hasn’t infected the rest of her class.

Mercie is the one to escort her back and make sure she’s tucked into bed. She makes a point of drawing the curtains to dampen the daylight, and pushing all of Annette’s textbooks, notes, and binders out of reach, before blowing out the candle and telling her to sleep.

Annette has every intention of getting out of bed and trying to figure out what today’s lecture was supposed to be. Instead, once her head hits the pillow, she sleeps like she was blown out with the candle.

She doesn’t wake until there’s a quiet knock at the door. By then there’s no daylight for the curtains to block, and her room is still and dark.

“Annie?” Mercedes calls from outside. “Are you awake? Can I come in?”

Annette draws in a breath to answer, and starts coughing. Somewhere between wheezes, she manages a strangled _“Sure!”_

She’s still catching her breath as the door swings open, letting in a gust of chilly night. Mercedes’ silhouette breezes in, and she snaps at the chandelier, lighting it with the one black magic trick she had Annette teach her.

“I brought you some dinner,” she says sweetly as she sets a tray down on the desk. Annette thinks she’s going to close the door, but instead Mercedes picks up a dressing gown off a chair and hands it to her. “Here. You also have another visitor.”

Annette sits up and wraps the robe over her nightgown, head still fuzzy. She’s pretty sure only Mercie is in the room with her. “I do?”

Mercedes adjusts the pillows behind her, then plunks the tray down on Annette’s lap. It’s chicken soup and soft rolls, and Annette can’t smell much right now, but it _looks_ like heaven. “You can come in now,” Mercie calls over her shoulder. “We probably shouldn’t let in too much of a draft.”

There’s a shuffle, and then Felix sidles in through the doorway, looking everywhere but at Annette. One hand is on the back of his neck. The other is clutching a notebook.

Mercie straightens up with a smile. “I have to go help Hilda with a hairband she’s sewing. Felix, you can take the dishes back to the dining hall, right? Thank you _so much.”_

She sweeps from the room in a swish of skirts, shutting the door behind her.

(This, of course, is a maneuver Mercedes has planned and executed with stone-cold precision. Somewhere beneath all his surly, snarling layers, Mercedes knows Felix to be grudgingly kind, and genuinely shy, and if the only way to get him to talk to Annette outside of class is to trap him into joining her for dinner, by the goddess Mercedes will make it so.

She does not, for a single moment, think this will jeopardize her ‘mutual pining’ stake in the betting pool. Have you _met_ Annette or Felix? They can barely stop working long enough to figure out their own feelings. They’re both swimming in enough family trauma to drown the idea that those feelings could be returned. No, Mercedes’ inevitable bracket victory is still all but guaranteed.)

“I should let you eat,” Felix mutters, at the same time Annette flops a hand at the desk chair and says, “Please, sit.”

There’s a lot of awkward and determined staring at the ceiling. Felix sits down.

Then he holds out the notebook. It’s _hers,_ Annette realizes, even though there are some new papers sticking out of the pages.

“Here,” Felix says gruffly. “There’s notes from today’s lecture.”

Annette snatches it from his hand with a speed that surprises both of them, like a starving orphan offered a cookie. “Oh thank the goddess, I was so nervous, midterms are so close and…” She trails off when she flips to the new notes.

By now, Annette has seen enough of Felix’s own notes to know two things.

First, this is his handwriting, sharp and narrow and in meticulously perfect lines.

Second, these are not his notes. Or more accurately: these are not the notes he takes for himself. He jots down vague strings of words, things that stick out, anything that interests him, and very little else. She’s been berating him to be more thorough with Reason lectures, since magic does not abide ambiguity.

But these notes are _beautiful._ They are organized. There are lists. Definitions. Bullet points. Goddess help her, there are _diagrams._

That muddled, confusing feeling returns with a vengeance.

“If they’re missing anything, you’ll have to ask someone else,” Felix says in a rush.

“No,” Annette breathes reverently. She could cry. “They’re _perfect.”_

Felix’s mouth twists into something perilously close to a smile. “Eat already. I don’t have all night.” Then he picks up one of the flasks of syrup Professor Manuela sent with her. “When are you supposed to have this?”

Annette reluctantly sets the notes down and starts in on her soup. “Probably now.”

Felix uncorks the flask, takes a whiff, makes a face, and passes it over. “Drink this first. Dinner will get the taste out of your mouth.”

That makes sense to Annette, so she throws the concoction down the hatch as fast as she can, her own face scrunching up at the aftertaste. “But really, thank you for the notes. I owe you—”

“No you don’t.” He sounds angry, albeit not with her, not exactly. “You’re doing too much already. Pushing yourself like this…it’s not going to change things with him.”

Annette blinks at him with a mouthful of bread roll. It’s half fever, half Manuela’s brew that makes her so forthright: “Then what are _you_ doing?”

Felix flinches.

“Sorry,” she says quickly, spraying crumbs. “I shouldn’t—”

“It’s fine.” Felix mindlessly undoes the knot in his hair, letting it fall around his shoulders. Annette’s breath catches. She’s seen him do this before, run his fingers through any tangles, tie it back up again, but that was in the class, in the training grounds, where anyone could see. This feels… private.

Felix starts running his hands through the knots. “When they brought Glenn’s armor back, all my father had to say was that he _died like a true knight._ Like it was fine they didn’t even have a body, because he died the _right _way. It’s disgusting.” His voice goes cold, cold as the winter creeping in around the monastery, and with his hair hanging dark around his pale face, he looks like a vengeful ghost. “I’m the only heir now. Everyone in Fraldarius territory is my responsibility, but my old man would let me die for the boar in a heartbeat. So I’m not going to let him. No matter what he throws me at… I’ll be worse.”

Annette has wondered for a long, long time what Felix sees, who he fights when he goes cold like that. Now she has an answer.

The frost snaps as he glances up, then points at her tray. “Eat your soup.”

_“Right!”_ Annette pulls her dressing gown around herself a little snugger, then asks, “You’re… not trying to prove anything to your father, then?”

He shakes his head, pulling his hair back up into its bun. “What am I supposed to prove? What are _you_ supposed to prove? That you’re good enough for him to do the bare minimum of his duty as a father? Trust me, _you’re_ not the problem.” Felix scowls and knots the tie around his hair. “So stop killing yourself for him. Take care of yourself. It… it’ll be annoying if we have to deploy to Remire without you.”

The cough syrup is definitely kicking in, because a slow smile blooms on Annette’s face.

“What?” Felix asks suspiciously.

“You,” she says, “are_ nice.”_

“And _you’re_ delirious,” he snaps, scooting the chair back like she’s about to attack.

Annette can’t stop grinning. It makes it a lot harder to eat her soup. “Why aren’t you this nice to everyone? You’re so…” Her vocabulary fails her. “…mean.”

“I’m—I’m _honest,”_ Felix stammers. “There’s no point in lying people for their own comfort, it makes it worse when they find out. It’s better to just say the truth.”

By now, Annette has learned his tell: the muscle that jumps in his throat when he lies. Like it’s doing now.

She knows it because he’s done just that many times before: lied to her to make her feel better.

Because, she thinks, smug and delighted and more than a little loopy on cough syrup, Felix is _secretly nice._

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks, indignant. Her grin only widens. Felix stares at her, baffled.

He stares a little too long.

“You’re done with your dinner,” he says quickly, and Annette realizes somehow, she’s managed to polish off her soup. She starts to lift the tray for him and looks up—

Felix is leaning over her bed to collect the dishes, he’s _right there,_ callused fingers brushing hers around the edges of the tray, she can’t smell anything and yet the sting of pine needles bites her tongue—

Then he’s all but bolting for the door. “Get some sleep.” He pauses. “I’ll… get you notes for tomorrow.”

“Goodnight, Felix,” she says drowsily, and something about those words feels strangely…comfortable.

They fit even better when he says, “Goodnight, Annette,” and pulls the door shut behind him.

That night, she dreams of pines.


	9. Ethereal Moon: The Wind and the Waltz

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry to slow down with this! hit a busy patch with my day job so I'm squeezing in work where I can. Hopefully it's worth the wait!

**Ethereal Moon: The Wind and the Waltz**

Annette knew Remire would be bad, but none of them really knew _how_ bad.

The Death Knight? Scary, but manageable.

Tomas the friendly old librarian turning out to be a creepy cult warlock all along? _Oof._ Still manageable, but _oof._

It’s the villagers that get to Annette. Little kids pulling knives on their parents. Neighbors trying to tear each other to pieces. It’s _horrible. _All her class can do is knock them out before they do something that can’t be undone. Sylvain and Dimitri are galloping through the fires, Ingrid is winging ahead, and they can only hope they’re fast enough.

Annette certainly is not. She’s mostly better. _Mostly._ Could she have used another day bundled up indoors, catching up on her classwork instead of deploying into one of the coldest months of the year? Sure. But even though Dorothea’s transferred into the Blue Lions now, she splits her time between swords and Reason. She doesn’t know enough spells to take Annette’s place.

At least…that’s what Annette wants to think. The alternative is…

_Not happening. Focus on the fight._

Felix seems to know she’s not totally on her game today. _Of course _he knows, they’ve barely trained together since she got sick. He’s brought a Levin sword along this time, and she doesn’t ask why, because the range on that is close to hers; he’s kept one eye on her and the other on anything that might slip through the cracks—

Like the villager that leaps over a crumbling wall, his axe swinging at her in a silver wheel.

The glyph is spinning into place, but there’s no way Annette’s wind will push him back fast enough.

Instead of the hard sear of iron in her gut, she catches an elbow to the side and stumbles back. The axe crashes into—

Steel.

It skids off, slides, bites deep into leather.

She’s never heard Felix cry out like he does now: like a wounded beast snarling its rage.

Something surges in Annette. Wind slams the villager into the wall, cracking his head against a beam, and he’s down for the count.

Felix sinks to a knee in front of her with a choking gasp. One hand grips his side, and bright crimson stains his uniform.

Annette’s mind goes blank.

Distantly, she hears herself screaming for Mercie, she watches the world shudder a few feet lower as she drops to kneel by Felix, bracing him as best she can. The only answer is a brief flash of white light, but Mercie is nowhere to be seen.

This is—it’s _bad._

This fight is so much worse than anything else they’ve faced.

Whatever Mercie did helped, at least. Felix’s breath steadies, and the gash in his side has sealed over, the flesh still red and raw and angry. Annette knows just enough Faith to tell he’s stable, but there’s only so much Mercie can do from a distance. That axe had to hit rib, maybe lung. Even if the bleeding’s stopped, only terrible pain could still keep Felix down like this.

The Death Knight will have to wait.

“Don’t let me slow you down,” Felix grits out.

Professor Byleth charges up the steps nearby, takes in the sight, and signals Annette to hold her position before running onward.

“Professor just ordered me to stay,” Annette returns. “That makes it official. You can’t get rid of me.”

She expects him to fight. He doesn’t, only gives a short jerk of a nod. That makes it all the worse.

All she can do is be ready to strike down anyone who gets too close; there’s nothing she can do to ease his pain. For the first time, Annette feels utterly, sickeningly helpless.

What follows is a moment neither of them will talk about for many, many years.

Remire burns with both of them on their knees. Her hand somehow slips into Felix’s bloody one, an anchor in the battle raging around them, and a faint, strained hum slips from her lips, one of her silly melodies that he claims to _not hate._ When she dares a look at him, his eyes are closed, cold sweat rolling down his face.

Minutes roll past in a fog. The two of them stay as they are.

The Death Knight is driven off, Tomas flees, the village is saved, and Mercedes arrives to tiredly patch up Felix with the dregs of her strength. It’s enough to get him back on his feet and to the wagons carrying the wounded back to Garreg Mach. It’s _not_ enough for him to indignantly refuse to ride in one.

That alone puts a knot in Annette’s stomach.

When the second round of wagons rolls out, carrying the rest of the troops back to the monastery, Annette sits with Mercedes, and neither of them speaks for a long while.

Then, finally, Annette asks something she’s avoided for as long as she can.

“Mercie,” she asks, voice shaking, “can you teach me to heal?”

The next day finds Annette in the training grounds, even though she should be resting. But she needs to get faster, stronger. She needs to work harder. She needs to solve this equation, find a _real _answer: what variable needs to change so Felix never takes a hit for her again?

It’s not the enemies: there’s no guarantee she won’t find herself in another situation where they need to put people down without killing them. It’s not her allies: Felix was doing fine. More than fine.

The problem is her. She can do better.

She _has_ to do better.

Annette fiddles with the gallery of targets that slide on rails, and sets up a circuit so they’ll cycle past her about as fast and as close as the villager with the axe. And then she tries.

She tries to lessen the force of Cutting Gale, but it’s right there in the name: it still slices targets clean in half.

She tries to blunt _Sagittae, _but at this range, the darts don’t have time to shed enough momentum, and the targets go flying with lethal force.

She tries her standby Wind, but it’s the same as it ever was: not enough, not fast enough, to make a difference.

But that’s the problem with magic. It’s all math. It takes a known amount of time to summon the glyph, each spell generates a measured amount of force at a specific rate, adjust for typical error-driven atrophy, and at the end of the day, the numbers are still not your friend.

But she keeps trying. Maybe she can forge that glyph faster. Maybe she can think ahead—but the point is to _react_ faster, to cast something strong enough to drop an enemy without killing them, but the numbers, and the momentum, and the math, none of it works, and _she_ is the problem, and _she_ has to keep trying—

“Here.”

Annette jumps about six feet straight into the air. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. When she whirls around, heart pounding, she finds Felix behind her, a training axe slung over a shoulder.

The first words out of Annette’s mouth are a high-pitched, furious _“You should be on bed rest!”_

“Mm. Probably.” Felix shrugs. He doesn’t _look_ like someone on bed rest; the only concession he’s made to the wound is ditching his uniform’s black waistcoat. “But I need to move around or I’ll get stiff.” He holds out the training axe. “Here. I owe you for the Reason help. We should settle that.”

It’s the first time Annette has held an axe in _months, _but the weight is familiar in her palms. “You don’t owe me for anything, we’re friends.”

It’s the first time the f-word has slipped out, and Annette isn’t sure how to feel about it.

It feels—appropriate.

It feels…inadequate.

But either Felix is on some serious painkillers, or he agrees, because he only narrows his eyes. “It’s not right if you’re the one always helping me. Anyway, I figured you were probably blaming yourself for…” He gestures vaguely at his side. If Annette looks closely, she can see stripes of white bandages through the fabric of his shirt.

“Because it _is_ my fault,” she says, “if I’d just let Dorothea be my stand-in—”

“I also figured I could _try_ to remind you it’s my job to handle the short-range enemies, and you’d still blame yourself anyway and want to find a solution. So.” He walks over to a barrel of training swords, pulls one out, and points it at her. “Melee weapons. There’s your answer. Let’s work on it.”

Annette wrings the haft of the axe between her sweating palms. “I don’t want you to push yourself.”

“Trust me, I won’t have to,” he says with enough confidence that, to Annette’s shock, she feels a little flare of ire.

Her _father_ taught her to swing an axe. And her father was good enough for the royal family.

It’s a little-known secret that Annette thought only Mercie had figured out: there are two reasons that Annette was at the top of her class in the Fhirdiad School of Sorcery. The first was her boundless determination to earn a recommendation to Garreg Mach.

The second is that she is _competitive._

Felix takes up position opposite her, moving cautiously around his injured side but deadly as ever. There’s a gleam in his eye that says he’s riling her up on purpose. “You still know how to use that thing?”

Annette gives the training axe a few test swings, then settles into her father’s stance: feet wide, tight grip, blade ready.

She gives Felix a grin that’s probably a little too cheerful for someone holding an axe. “Why don’t you come find out?”

* * *

“Let me get this straight,” Sylvain says under his breath as they stand at the edge of the classroom, watching chaos unfold as tables and desks are pushed out of the way. The professor has been tasked with selecting a student to represent them in the White Heron Cup, and to Felix’s complete and utter disgust, she’s insisted on _dancing lessons_ to help her make her choice. He and Sylvain, both veterans of their parents' mandatory dancing instruction _(You must represent House Fraldarius well, Felix, on and off the battlefield!),_ are just trying to keep clear of the fray.

“There’s nothing to _get straight,”_ Felix mutters back. He’s not sure when he started letting Sylvain talk to him like they’re friends again.

Sylvain is eyeing him sideways like a miracle worker. “Oh no, I think there is. You’re telling me you just popped up behind Annette, _with an axe,_ and that was _fine?_ It was just—_” _the word comes out a little strangled. _“Fine?!”_

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

(Unbeknownst to Felix, Sylvain is running numbers in his head. He has only until the end of Ethereal Moon for his betting pool prediction—_“Caught messily making out in the library before Guardian Moon”—_is ruled out. While most of Sylvain’s relationships feel more like pantomime than anything, he’d like to think the sheer volume of experience gave him an edge in predicting the outcome. And if Felix can drop in on Annette _with an axe in hand_ and not wind up a scorch mark on the training court ground, Sylvain is positive he's still in the game.

That said… Felix is a creature of denial. Messy makeouts require _urges,_ a fire Felix can't deny. Perhaps… accelerant is in order.)

“Usually picking up an axe and sneaking up behind someone ends badly,” Sylvain says, then changes the subject before Felix can object that he absolutely _did not sneak._ “You know the winner of the White Heron Cup gets to train as a Dancer?”

“Yeah, so what?” Felix scoffs.

“I’m just saying…” Sylvain raises his eyebrows. “Have you _seen_ the Dancer uniform?”

Felix squints at him. “What about it?”

For a moment, Sylvain gets a painfully familiar look on his face, the impatient one from when they were young and he would try to explain things like math and magic and wind up saying _I don’t know, it just works like that!_

Then it’s gone as Sylvain cracks a grin and tips his head at the middle of the room. Professor Byleth has gathered the girls first, walking them through the basic steps of a waltz.

“So,” Sylvain says, “anyone you’re rooting for?”

The first thing Felix thinks of is a hand locked around his, soft humming tethering him to consciousness; the first thing his eyes land on is a shock of fire-bright hair as Annette hums a half song, half mumbled _one-two-three, one-two-three_ as she and Mercedes spin in a circle.

The second thing he thinks of…involves the Dancer uniform.

_“Shut up,”_ Felix says a little too loud, shoving Sylvain away. Trust Sylvain to make everything about chasing skirts.

Or, his mind happily supplies, about the lack of them; he recalls the uniform to be little more than strips of white silk pinned haphazardly together, with that intriguing slit up the side—

(Sylvain is watching Felix cycle through panic and fascination with a gambler’s eye. If left to his own devices, Felix will focus solely on swords and cutting things with them, and getting better at cutting things with them, and simply refuse to admit that somewhere deep in his heart of hearts he might actually experience human emotion. Has this left his friend completely unprepared to feel things, especially about other people? Absolutely. Will that stop Sylvain from making sure the betting pool is his? Absolutely not.)

If anyone notices Felix suddenly cease his grumbling about wasting class time on something so frivolous, they don’t say a thing. And, in the end, Felix does see that it’s not just about the White Heron Cup. Ashe, Dedue, Raphael (the newest transfer), even Flayn, they’re not born to noble houses, nor are they trained performers like Dorothea. They’ve been spared the dancing lessons that are demanded of noble children.

There’s a grace there that Felix can’t help but note. Professor Byleth didn’t single out the amateurs; she used the White Heron Cup as an excuse to prepare them for the ball.

Even so, in the end, Annette looks more than a little disappointed when Dorothea is chosen to compete for them.

Felix will never in a thousand years admit, even to himself, that she’s not the only one.

The ball itself is as uncomfortable as Felix expects it to be. He spends most of it glued to the wall once again, trying not to follow Annette around the room as she whirls with Caspar (ungainly and a _terrible_ lead), Claude (too eager to spin her around a little too fast), Mercedes (Mercedes is fine), Hilda (Hilda is also fine), and Dimitri (Felix will probably kill the boar in his sleep.)

Dimitri makes Annette laugh, and Felix amends his assessment: he will kill the boar in his sleep. _Tonight._

(Unbeknownst to Felix, for the prince, it’s a consolation dance. It is very clear Felix and Annette are not attending the ball together, and that means Dimitri is out of the pool. He will throw his lot in with Ashe’s prediction: an impassioned confession in the middle of battle.)

What makes Felix even more uncomfortable, though, is that Glenn is pestering him nonstop. His brother is calling him heartless every time he turns down an invitation to dance, especially since Dorothea is _quite_ persistent. His brother is calling him a fool every time he searches the room and his heart—_not his heart, nope, he doesn’t care—_drops a little to find Annette already in someone else’s arms.

Glenn calls him a coward every time the memory flashes through Felix’s skull: catching Annette when she was sick, steadying her before Dimitri swept her away to the infirmary.

_Because you’re not doing a damn thing about it,_ Glenn insists.

Then the band winds down their lively jig, and strikes up a slow, sweet waltz.

Felix sees bright copper in the corner of his eye. Annette has stepped back from the dance floor, looking around, almost…hopeful? Her gaze skims right over him.

_It’s fine,_ he tells himself immediately.

After a few bars, her smile turns brittle. She walks swiftly toward the doors leading out of the reception hall.

Felix finds himself slipping after her before he can convince himself not to.

It’s cold out, bitingly so; a blanket of snow fell days ago, and hasn’t budged since, despite the clear skies. Every star in the heavens seems like it’s gathered to watch him follow Annette into the night, and he wishes he could tell them to mind their own business. She’s marched out onto the bridge between the hall and the cathedral, fists balled at her sides, and for a moment it looks like she wants to take a swing at the church itself.

He makes sure to scuff his boot soles on the ground, because axe or no axe, if Annette doesn’t want company right now, surprise company will only be worse. She looks back at him, then sighs and leans against the bridge railing, burying her face in her hands.

“This was our song,” Annette says. “When I was little, Father would have me stand on his feet and we’d dance to this, and then when I was too big, we’d dance like normal whenever they played it, and I thought…I was hoping…” She trails off, lifting her head to stare over the bridge, into the snow-draped forest below. “It’s stupid to keep hoping.”

“You’re a lot of things, but you’re not stupid.” _That_ absolutely came out wrong. Felix kicks himself internally.

Glenn is aghast. _You can do better than that!_

_No I can’t!_ he finds himself arguing back. _I don’t know what to say!_

_Then DO something!_

The strains of the violins still drift on the icy air. It’s a song that makes Annette think of dancing with her father. He can—he can change one part of that equation, at least.

Felix makes himself hold out a hand.

Annette stares at it, then up at him, blinking as if the idea is so foreign she can’t quite process it. Heat rises on Felix’s neck, and he’s ready to turn back and return to the hall—no, the dorm—no, Fraldarius territory—

Her hand settles in his.

“Okay,” Annette says.

And it’s all a little too easy: his hand on her hip, hers on his shoulder, and _one-two-three_ and they’re off, gliding toward the cathedral. It’s like they’ve danced this every day of their lives. It’s like he’s never seen her before. It’s familiar. It’s electric.

They’re the only ones on the frigid stone bridge, and he’s lost in a kaleidoscope of windows lit in gold from the hall, bright stained glass of the cathedral, the bottomless deep blue of the night sky. Their breath makes faint smudges in the air, and the music carries them to the middle of the bridge, then back towards the hall.

They don’t say a word, and it is perfect, and their only witnesses are the stars.

The waltz ends on a dip, and for a moment, the midwinter night freezes them in place, her fingers curling into his collar, stars caught in her eyes, his head bowed close enough to—to _what?_

_What am I DOING?_

Felix doesn’t know—but he doesn’t want to let go.

The doors to the reception hall burst open, and Raphael stumbles out, fanning himself. “Whew! Getting toasty in there! Oh, hey guys, didn’t see you.”

Annette and Felix do not know it yet, but they have set a land speed record for the time it takes to jump to opposite sides of the bridge.

“Just heading back in, actually, haha, thank you for holding the door, Raphael, hahaha,” Annette babbles, brushing her skirt down and straightening her hair.

“Right, inside,” Felix finds himself stammering, and there’s a wave of warmth and light and noise, and suddenly they’re back in the reception hall, and he’s not quite sure _what_ happened, or what _almost_ happened, and he’s still friends with Annette, right? They’re still friends.

At some point they had to have become friends without him noticing, because he was pretty sure he was done with friends when he came to Garreg Mach, and now… he sees her almost every day, he practices _something—_melee or Reason or whatever they feel like—almost every day, and when she’s not there…

There’s a hole. It doesn’t feel right.

She snuck into his life, and now they’re—friends. That’s what that means.

Right?

The musicians start up another song, a cheery saltarello, and Annette catches his sleeve. “Come on!” She tugs him towards the dance floor.

Friends dance with each other. It’s fine.

It’s _fine._

Felix follows Annette into the crowd, trying not to think too hard about the flush in her cheeks, the stars in her eyes, or the way every inch of him is aware of her fingers laced in his.

(The next day, Dimitri will make an ardent case that they may not have arrived together, but they danced together before the school, the teachers, and the goddess, and _that_ qualifies as attending the ball together. He will tragically find himself overruled.)


	10. Guardian Moon: Oh No

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *emerges from the deadline jungle* WHAT YEAR IS IT

**Guardian Moon: Oh No**

Garreg Mach feels colder now, colder even than midwinter.

Part of it is just the weather, still clear and bitter with frost. There’s not as much snow as in Fraldarius territory, but Felix still wakes to thorns of frost in the lawns, and patches of deadly hard ice on the walkways.

Part of it, though, is the loss.

He wishes he couldn’t understand how Professor Byleth keeps moving through the day. How she keeps steadfast at her desk, drumming out lectures, walking through the drills, immovable, unstoppable.

He understands that too well, and wishes he didn’t.

Some people leave only pinholes in your life when they go; others tear chasms open behind them. You can stare off that edge, into the deep, as long as you want, or you can start walking and hope at some point you find a place to cross.

Few of the Blue Lions had spent much time with Jeralt, but they’ve all grown up with stories, and the weight of the professor’s grief is… contagious. No one is surprised to find a red-eyed Leonie sitting quietly in the back of the classroom now.

Felix and Annette don’t talk about it. And that’s the only relief, really: both of their fathers are alive, and still, she and he know in a terrible way what it’s like to lose them. They don’t _need_ to talk about it with each other. They don’t need to dig up those empty coffins.

Instead they do what they do best: keep working.

Felix tries not to pace over the cold training grounds. Today’s the day he casts his first spell, with Annette’s supervision of course. The first step is to figure out which spell tree he’s innately drawn to, Wind or Fire, and just as a precaution, they’ve covered Blizzard as well. They’ve practiced the glyphs over and over again, nailing down each and every symbol and incantation, until Felix can manage at least _those_ in his sleep.

The real test will be if he can sustain the glyph and channel the magic. No amount of studying and theory can prepare him for that. Then again, if Lorenz can manage it, Felix will find a way, solely out of spite.

Annette finishes setting up their targets, a scattering of dummies in barrels. She trots over, and Felix tries not to notice how the chill fogs her breath, how it’s turned her cheeks pink. “Alright, we’re ready to go,” she says resolutely. “Are you nervous?”

“Why would I be?” Felix fires back a little too fast.

_Asshole,_ Glenn grumbles. _Of course you’re nervous._

Felix ducks his head, awkward. “We… we’ve practiced enough. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Annette’s face lifts with a smile so bright Felix doesn’t know that he can look at it directly. “Right! So, what do you want to try first, Wind or Fire?” At his noncommittal shrug, she taps her chin. “Let’s start with Wind.”

Part of him is oddly pleased she doesn’t think he’s drawn to Fire. You can master spells outside your innate tree, of course, but the first one says a lot about you. Fire is melodramatic, impulsive, destructive, impossible to control; it’s everything he hates seeing in the boar.

Felix wonders if the professor knows she’s playing with fire when she lets the prince swear her enemies are his.

Wind, though, wind is fine by him. Sometimes imprecise, a little flighty, lighter on the damage at first, but better suited to him than the explosive fury of fire.

_It suits Annette best,_ Glenn notes. _Are you sure it works for you?_

Felix plants himself in the training ground dirt and holds the glyph in his mind, running through the incantations. If it’s a spell he’s compatible with, the red lines should ignite in front of him, and the wind will blow the way he commands.

The glyph is perfect. He can feel the buzz of magic currents stirring around him, the rush of magic trying to take form—

Then nothing.

Annette frowns. “Wind can be tricky. Try it again.”

He does. No luck. The magic should pour itself through the gate he opens with the glyph, but instead it twists and coils and darts away like one of the skittish monastery cats.

“Hm. Okay.” Annette looks genuinely puzzled. “Guess it’s not the Wind tree, then. Let’s try Fire.”

It’s no better, and Felix is starting to feel worse by the second. The wind did not blow for him, and the fire does not kindle, the magic refusing his glyph. The process is _perfect; _he and Annette have put in too much work for it to be anything less than that. He knows he’s doing it exactly right, and yet—

There are some people who have no gift for magic at all, or they’re heavily skewed towards Faith over Reason, or—or—

There are a thousand ways in which all the hours they’ve spent together turn out to be a massive waste of time. He is to blame for all of them.

The dummies in their barrels watch as they try Blizzard, and they watch as he fails to cast that too. That’s Felix’s last hope: the magic tree is uncommon, but for a son of Fraldarius, he could see why magic would manifest as the winter itself.

Instead, not even the ice of his home will answer.

It’s Annette’s turn to pace under the eaves as they warm up by a brazier, one finger hooked against her chin as she mutters to herself. “It doesn’t make sense, your glyphs are _flawless,_ and there’s no spellcasting damper, and the equations are balanced, and—the materials? No…”

Months ago, Professor Byleth had asked him what he would cut away to change what he’s capable of. The answer, he’s always thought, was his weaknesses. Chisel them off, file down the stumps, shed the weight and move faster.

But that has never stopped people like Sylvain and Ingrid from mining the weaknesses under the surface. Felix hates it every time.

And this feels close enough that he’s ready to break it off. “It’s fine,” he says stiffly, “it didn’t work. We should move on.”

Annette slows her pacing, tilts her head at him, trailing off mid-mutter. “…Did you say something?”

Felix opens his mouth to tell her it’s time to give up—then stops. She has that look on her face, one he’s seen a hundred times before, and still not the one he expects.

It’s not the exasperated, pained look Sylvain and Ingrid give him, like he’s a shield cracked down the middle that needs to be reforged. It’s the look he loves, the one Annette gets when she’s working through a particularly complicated set of equations, but this time he’s one of her variables—

Wait.

Stop.

Wait.

Did he just think _lov—_

Annette’s eyes widen. “That’s _it!_ Come on!” She seizes Felix by the wrist and drags him back onto the training ground.

Felix, who is holding off a complete and unabridged personal crisis through sheer determination to _not think about what he just thought,_ does not have it in him to fight being dragged.

Before he knows it he’s been posted before the gallery of dummies once more. Annette is standing in front of him, eyes narrowed. “We haven’t gone over this one yet, and _I’m_ not compatible with it, but if _I_ build the glyph, and _you_ channel…Right. Okay. Right.” She picks up each of his hands in hers, and Felix is _not thinking about it._ “Follow my lead.”

Anyone else and he’d have shoved them off and bolted, but he—goddess damn it all, he trusts her?

When did he start _trusting_ people again?

Annette moves his hands in a strange, precise circle, and he can feel the glyph searing to life, he can feel the swell of magic in the air, then in _him, _and it demands a target before it tears him to shreds—

His eyes land on a dummy. There’s a crack and a blinding blaze of light, and all that’s left is a charred, twisted wreck.

_Thunder._ Of course.

He was raised to strike once, and make it count the first time.

Annette lets go, and the glyph stays glowing in front of him. “Try it again.”

Felix’s hands move on his own this time, and he feels what it’s _supposed_ to feel like: the gate opens, the magic builds in him like a charge, and then it _vents_ in a single, lethal blow.

Lightning strikes twice. Felix lets out a laugh of disbelief.

He _did_ it.

He calls the magic again, strikes another dummy down, then another, then he loses count, then—

Annette is hauling on his elbow, face pale and urgent, and her mouth is moving like she’s been shouting at him. _“—have to stop!”_

Startled, Felix goes still. The glyph fades away.

That’s when it hits. Sweat has drenched his shirt even though it’s near freezing out, and he’s breathing as hard as if he’s been sprinting for the last hour. Every muscle burns like the ozone on his tongue. And there’s a strange, almost giddy high, the euphoria after he’s worked himself to the bone, pounding through his veins.

“Should have warned you,” Annette says, sagging with relief. “They say that one’s easy to lose track of. One more cast and you would have been out.”

On some level Felix has known magic takes a toll. He’s seen Annette down to her last dregs, and even Lysithea can grow trembly and pale when she’s pushed too far.

He just didn’t understand what it would _feel_ like. He is winded and worn, he is inches from keeling over, he is elated and exhilarated and he _did_ it and Annette—

She’s still hanging onto his arm, relief tempered with triumph in her eyes, and it’s beautiful, _she’s _beautiful—

_Oh no._

With perfect, unyielding clarity, Felix realizes that he wants to kiss her.

No, that’s not quite right. He wants to pick her up and spin her around and sing along with her songs and put his coat around her and bury his fingers in the flames of her hair and really, _really_ kiss her until the sun goes down and comes back up, and you know what? If he spent the next week kissing her he’d be just fine with that.

Not fine. That would be _incredible._

_Oh NO._

It’s the rush, it’s the adrenaline, but it’s only stripping away all the denial he’s been shellacking over the simple, unshakeable truth. He doesn’t just like Annette; she’s not just a friend to him. He _wants_ her. He wants to be with her. Not the way Sylvain shuffles through girls like playing cards. This is something bone-deep, unshakeable as her songs.

This is something he’s felt for a _while._

This is, Felix understands with mounting dread, a weakness. One of his own making.

_No, no, no, no, no—_

He doesn’t realize she’s steered him back to the eaves, next to the brazier, until they’re sitting down and she’s passing him a steaming mug. The sting of peppermint tea jolts him from the endless cycle of _no no no no no_, though he can’t look straight at Annette without blood rushing to his face. Instead he stares at the tea and mumbles _“Thanks.”_

She grins at him, and he almost falls off the bench. “I should have warned you about that too. The first few times you get close to your limit, you can get a little…loopy. It’ll wear off soon, but we should call it a day.” Her grin widens. “Thunder. Of _course_ it was thunder. That’s perfect for you.”

His stomach flips at that. She knows him too well.

But maybe—maybe all this is just a fluke, a chemical fantasy. “Does it always feel like this?” Felix makes himself ask.

“You’ll get used to it. Your body just funneled a huge amount of energy, and it can’t tell the difference between _your_ energy and magic, and it still takes your own strength to actually cast the spell, and there’s transference and entropy to factor in, and…” Annette waves a hand. “The point is, it’s like any other kind of exercise. The more you do it, the more you get used to your limits. Soon you won’t even…” Her smile slips a little bit, but she turns it into a short laugh. “You won’t even need me anymore.”

That heady buzz is fading, leaving a tremor in his hands, in his breath.

There’s another buzz in its place, one that flashes in his veins like lightning with every furtive glance at Annette.

Months of denial are crumbling away. It’s not just the magic, it’s not just the adrenaline rush.

Somehow, over every class, every formula they’ve worked through, every song he’s eavesdropped on, every time her knuckles tighten on the axe haft, somehow, _somehow_… he’s become weak.

Weak for _her._

“Hmph,” he says tonelessly, because if any emotion’s going to break through in his voice right now, it will be the landslide of pure and unadulterated panic. Better nothing, _nothing_ gets through at all. “Maybe.”

Belatedly Felix realizes he’s just told Annette he won’t need her.

But—but that’s all part of the plan, isn’t it? Become the worst thing on the battlefield, using whatever means necessary. Be terrible enough that nothing and no one will dare cross you. Strong enough to plant yourself in front of what you cannot live without, and keep your enemies at bay.

What good is any of this, if not to protect someone like her?

But then—what good is _any_ of this, if she’s not there?

“Uh,” Felix mutters into his tea. “I… still need to learn the Thunder glyph.”

He doesn’t see Annette brighten, but he hears it in her voice. “It’s not too different from Wind or Fire, but the focus elements have been rotated thirty degrees, and—well, we’ll get into it later. You should probably try to sleep for a few hours.” He starts to protest, but she cuts him short. “Don’t make that face at me. You probably feel like you just got run over by a supply wagon.”

She is _absolutely_ right, and he _absolutely_ will not admit that. “I have warehouse duty,” he says instead.

“I’ll do it. I mean, Sylvain will. He owes me a favor. And he probably owes you for something.”

(It’s actually the inverse: Sylvain has been insisting since the beginning of the month that Felix has cost him twenty gold. Sylvain also will not, under any circumstance, explain why or how, at least in any meaningful way. The closest he got was a jumbled rant about what he termed Felix’s _“emotional constipation”_ and the beginning of a crude remark about Annette, which left Felix with no choice but to shove Sylvain into the fish pond before he finished it.)

Felix doesn’t want to rest. He doesn’t want Sylvain picking up his chores for him. He doesn’t _want_ more debts, more favors owed, more—more ties to other people.

He could cut it all off now before he’s in too deep. Wrap up his Reason studies, quietly go back to practicing without Annette, spit enough bile at Ingrid and Sylvain so they mind their own goddess-damned business, _stop_ trying to rattle Dimitri into reckoning with his bloodthirst.

He could drown himself in the training yards and battles and steel and blood until he forgets how being around Annette feels like walking in the sun.

The professor told him he would have to cut parts of himself away. He came to Garreg Mach to be the worst thing on the battlefield. He came here to be the only thing, the _last_ thing on the battlefield.

_That’s what you came here for,_ Glenn says, _to be strong, because you thought only strength could protect you. You know better now._ _But you decide how you’re going to leave._

Felix has faced his worst nightmare more than once now: a battlefield where he can no longer fight. Where he no longer controls his own fate.

And every time, Annette has been there to protect him.

If she is his weakness, then—then perhaps that’s not what Professor Byleth wants him to cut away.

Felix wants to run from the training ground, run from Annette, run from every weakness.

Instead he quietly says, “Okay.” Sylvain clearly needs to be kept busy anyway.

And then Felix sips at his peppermint tea, and wonders if anyone will notice him taking a running leap into the fish pond at this hour.

* * *

Annette Fantine Dominic is many things. She is a certified Mage; she may be one of the youngest students to attain the Warlock class if she can manage it by year’s end; she is an agent of chaos in the kitchen; she is a Blue Lion and a loyal citizen of Faerghus and the heir of House Dominic, or what’s left of it.

She is also a terrible liar. She’s known that about herself since she was five, and tried to convince her mother that it must have been _fairies_ who took a single bite out of every miniature tart on the tray. Lying is a waste of time for her.

And yet, even though she _knows_ she is lying to herself now, Annette is pretty sure if she doesn’t keep doing it, she’s going to die. It’s possible to die of feelings, right?

(It is, according to the books Bernadetta likes, and it usually involves swooning in a meadow full of wildflowers and wasting tragically away until the hero finds your still-beautiful corpse. Annette suspects the Garreg Mach equivalent would be flopping into the hay in the stables, which would only be lethal if a misplaced pitchfork was involved.)

Something _happened_ in Ethereal Moon. No, not _some_thing, there’s no mystery to it at all, no unproven theorems. Annette knows exactly what happened.

She just needs to keep lying to herself about it.

She just needs to keep telling herself that when Felix broke through the fog of bitter nostalgia and swept her up in a waltz on a winter night—_swept,_ listen to her, she even _sounds_ like a tragic heroine—she has to lie to herself that that didn’t mean anything.

It didn’t mean anything, how she could forget every ache of every note because her hand was so warm in his.

It didn’t mean anything, how the faintest ghost of his breath brushed her face in that final dip.

It doesn’t mean anything, how she can’t stop thinking about the look in his eyes then, the soft deep indigo sky dusted with stars above, the way she wanted to stay like that and yet still wanted to move _closer—_

It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything, _it doesn’t mean anything._

Annette shoves a book back onto its shelf in the library with perhaps a bit more enthusiasm than is called for.

It’s a lie, and she _knows_ it’s a lie, but the alternative is…

The alternative is she ruins one of her most precious friendships even faster than she’s managed to demolish a dinner before.

Granted, if anyone were to shrug it off and move along, it would be Felix. She might not be able to look at him for a month, but at least he would make it painless.

At least she had the luck to fall for—

_No one and nothing but my studies._ Another book slams back into its place.

There’s an odd, crabby, cramped feel to it, this lie. She used to be able to giggle with Mercedes about handsome stoic monks, who was crushing on whom, cute couples and ugly breakups. Now it all feels too close to home.

And it’s _Felix _(no it’s not, it’s nothing). They’re only friends because she can help him be stronger.

_And he won’t need you much longer._

And that’s going to be fine. It’ll be fine! Why wouldn’t that be fine?

Annette is singing under her breath as she tidies the library, and for _absolutely no related reason,_ the lyrics have taken an unusually destructive bent.

“If you blow up the library, where will we put all the books?”

The noise Annette makes can academically be called a yelp, but it involves every vowel she knows, and perhaps a few she’s invented on the spot. She spins around on the step ladder, hand pressed to her pounding heart, and squeaks, _“What are you doing here, Felix?!”_

Felix is leaning on the frame of the library’s door, utterly unruffled. “I heard singing.”

It is very apparent that Annette can, in fact, die of feelings. “You were watching me again, weren’t you?”

“You shouldn’t dance up there,” Felix says, and it’s enough of a non-answer to tell her everything she needs to know. “You’ll fall.”

Annette’s cheeks are burning so bright she’s half-expecting them to melt off. She sits on the step ladder, _hard,_ and buries her face in her hands, babbling something about how she could have picked literally any other song to sing.

“A different song? Like what?” Felix sounds closer. At least by now she knows him well enough to tell he’s not making fun of her. (She’s heard him make fun of people. Well, not really. He doesn’t bother making fun of people, he just fires off multiple devastatingly personal observations with a few scathing insults for garnish, and then saunters off while Mercedes shakes her head and starts flipping through her recipe book for the victim’s favorite treat.)

That doesn’t mean her answers are any less ridiculous, though. “Any of them! The box song! Or maybe the dungeon song!” Those songs make sense. She’s actually worked out the lyrics, instead of making them up on the spot, unlike her nonsense about demolishing a library.

“Now those sound interesting.” Felix _definitely_ sounds closer. She smells pine needles.

Annette ventures a look from between her fingers. He’s standing a few feet away, head tilted, and it’s—no, it’s not cute, no one in their right mind would call Felix cute if they wanted to see another dawn. Charming? Charming. Charming without artifice or agenda, and—

She’s staring.

“No, they’re just regular songs,” she says hastily. He’s having a dreadful effect on her ability to think straight. She needs—she needs—distance. “Oh, forget it. While you’re here, can you help me clean up?” Annette points to a bookcase on the other side of the library. “I need the books on that shelf up there, but I can’t reach them.”

“Oh. Sure, no problem.” Felix walks away, and Annette takes the opportunity to attempt several deep, calming breaths. They do not help. Especially when he calls back after a moment, “What? You’re not going to sing anymore?”

_Oh no._

She presses her hands to her cheeks to try to hide her furious blushing. “No way! It’s too embarrassing! And that song isn’t even finished, anyway.”

Felix doesn’t look at her, methodically stacking the books on a nearby table, but there’s clear rue in his voice. “Ah, that’s too bad. I wanted to hear what happened after the library was blown away.”

Then his eyes _do_ dart to her, and it’s not a request, it’s _certainly_ not a plea, but like everything else Felix does, it is minimalist and still _horrendously _effective. Annette feels like a monster. “Don’t look at me like that,” she sputters, only to feel worse when he obliges, turning back to the shelf. The tips of his ears are turning a surprising shade of pink. It’s as good as a deathblow to her resolve. “Okay, _fine._ If you insist.”

Annette wasn’t kidding when she said the song isn’t finished, because she was making the lyrics up on the spot then, and she sure is still, because _My! What a great job I did!_ is a bold stance to take after hypothetically blowing up a library. And goddess knows if she were to look Felix in the eye right now, the library wouldn’t be the only thing imploding.

When she finishes, Felix is walking a stack of books over. He hands them to her and simply says, “Huh. That doesn’t really explain what happened with the library. Maybe they’ll build a new one?”

For a moment his fingers brush hers, and—she can’t keep lying to herself.

This is _ridiculous._ It’s ridiculous, it’s _pointless,_ they barely have anything in common, he doesn’t even like _sweets—_

But somehow, in the last few months, he has snuck into her heart like a stray cat through an open window, curling up where it pleases and staying as long as it likes. And some people can convince themselves of a lie even when they know it’s a lie, but Annette is a woman of science and facts and reason, and no matter how inconvenient… it means something.

_He_ means something to her.

Is she going to tell him that? _Goddess,_ no. She’s not even sure if Felix is into girls. Or anyone, really. He doesn’t seem to seek out company outside of class (well, except for her, but they’re _practicing, _that’s different.)

Clearly, the more reasonable option is to pretend like absolutely nothing has changed, and to pretend that she’s _not _having a hard time breathing around him, and pretend she’s _not _thinking about pine needles and callouses and steel when he’s gone, and—and—that’s that. Let it pass with time.

“Ugh,” she grumbles, “this is so embarrassing.”

Felix does one of those faces that she can’t, academically speaking, call a smile. But it’s in the same genus. And yet again: minimalist. Again: _horrendously_ effective.

Annette tells herself one more lie: she can wait this out like a storm, and it will all blow over, and that will be fine.

(This time, Ingrid is the one to observe this all from a convenient spot in the corridor outside. She spends the next week cheerfully tormenting Sylvain with how close he got to winning the betting pool. One month earlier, and one messy makeout _actually_ initiated, and the twenty gold would have been his. When Felix finds himself shoulder-checked into the fish pond this time, he assumes Sylvain’s just getting revenge.

Felix is correct, at least, about the crime; he is grossly incorrect about the motive.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (btw please no one tell me the "you shouldn't dance up there" line was changed, I know, but the older line is way closer to the actual translation!)


	11. Pegasus Moon: The Shield

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi all. long time, no see. I have to apologize, I've been bogged down with a dayjob project that called for basically all of my creative output, which finally wrapped up. I was always going to come back to finish this, but ngl, returning RIGHT NOW makes me feel a little like The Avatar. Anyway, sorry about the wait. Hopefully the next one won't be as long. <3

**Pegasus Moon: The Shield**

If you were to ask Annette Fantine Dominic when, during the school year, she realized the world was coming to an end, she would not give you a straight answer. Because the fact is: there isn’t one.

Lonato. The Sword of the Creator. Miklan. Wind vanes, all of them, creaking a warning as they turned.

Flayn, she would say, was when the seed first fell to soil. That was when it was clear the Death Knight and the Flame Emperor had drawn a target on them.

Remire, Annette would say, was when that seed began to take root. It wasn’t just that they had an enemy; the enemy was numerous, monstrous, and _organized_.

Jeralt was when the blades began to pierce the earth. Demonic Beasts in the ruins, a dead man in the grass, and Professor Byleth openly weeping for the first time. That’s when Annette realized for the first time that everything she knew—could be broken.

But the moment she realizes the world, as she knows it, is ending, is the moment after Solon rips the professor from it.

There is a rush of darkness and shadow, and then quiet.

The Blue Lions are scattered all over the battlefield when it happens, so only a few of them even see it. Ingrid on her Pegasus above, disbelieving. Dimitri charging through the trees, only to come up just—just short.

The look on his face isn’t human.

She and Felix were sprinting closer, but they both… just… slow.

They were running to back up Professor Byleth. Now there’s nothing to save.

Wind sweeps across the stone. Annette is shaking, she is utterly stymied, it’s not, not, not _possible,_ it’s the end of the world—

This time, Felix is the one to reach for her hand.

And that’s how they survive it, the end of the world: hand in hand. Just like Remire. That’s how they make it through the moment when it felt like Fódlan let out a breath, and did not take another. Not until their professor cut her way _out of_ _the sky itself_ to return, blazing like a saint.

It’s a whip-crack that snaps them all back into motion. They rout Solon’s soldiers, his monsters, and the professor strikes him down herself. And for a moment, Annette can pretend—that’s it. Right? Solon and Kronya are gone, and whatever this is, it’s dying with them.

But it’s not.

They all know it’s not.

At the end of the day, when they’ve all been healed up and checked over and stuffed with dinner and sent to bed, Annette returns to her room alone. She’d talk to Mercie, but… things are strange with Mercie. _She_ made things strange with Mercie last week, when she was ready to serve up two piping hot fistfuls of _Sagittae_ to the man threatening them. She just wanted so badly to make things feel _safe_ again.

But now that means that she goes to her cold room by herself, and sits on her cold bed by herself, and has no one to talk to about the end of the world she knew. The one where the professor wasn’t a walking god, and there was nothing haunted in Dimitri’s smile, and…

The one where Felix had not yet reached for her.

They’ve clasped hands before, briefly on the training grounds to help each other up, longer in Remire, longer the night of the Winter Ball. But there is a difference between offering a hand and reaching for one.

And for the first time, it’s something Annette cannot break down into measurable, quantifiable units. Bernadetta’s books are all very clear: there is a specific order of operations. Amorous interest must be declared, then a series of outings (with the occasional life-threatening kerfuffle if you liked things spicy, perhaps being threatened by brigands or a kidnapping courtesy of a brutish count), and then _true love_ would be declared, and _then,_ and _only then,_ was the heroine allowed to kiss her love interest. And then they held hands _after._

Annette could forgive Felix for breaking the rules, but this isn’t an equation she knows. Or rather: she doesn’t know what she’s solving for, x or y or friends or—more.

She wishes she was talking to Mercie.

She wishes… she could talk to Felix.

So the next day, she does.

(For someone who struggled to even tell Linhardt where to shove the boxes he wouldn’t help her carry, it’s an astonishingly bold move.)

Annette, of course, has no intention of asking him about it directly. The easy way to do it would be to say, _Hey, remember how yesterday you held my hand, and how back in Ethereal Moon we danced on the bridge, and by the way I might be in love with you, and I have a fifteen-minute gap in my schedule where we could make out behind the dorms._

For a multitude of reasons, Annette has not elected to do this the easy way.

Instead she’s decided to do this the easiest way you do things with Felix, specifically: while trying to hit him with a stick in the training grounds.

“So,” she wheezes, swinging her training axe through the chilly air, “how do you feel about the Thunder glyph?”

He blocks her with a blunted sword, too easy, too easy, it’s always too easy with him. “Good,” he says cautiously. “I… think I may try for the Mortal Savant exams.”

Then the training blade moves in another one of those whip-cracks, the kind that snap everything upside-down. The tip stops well before it’d hit her throat, but they both know a killing blow when they see it.

Mortal Savants. As deadly with magic as they are with blades. And Felix—he’d be great at it. He’d be a nightmare on the battlefield, a demon of lightning and steel.

The training sword taps her on the upper arm, light. Then Felix steps back. “Watch your elbow.”

She lets out a too-stiff laugh and braces herself again for the next round. “Yeah. Mortal Savant, huh? You _definitely_ won’t need me after that.”

Felix—wavers.

Annette can’t remember _ever_ seeing him do that.

Then he lowers his sword, straightening out of his stance, and stares uncomfortably at a dummy sagging like a drunk in one of the side galleries. “We shouldn’t need each other at all.”

_Oh._

Annette feels like she’s falling through Fódlan, like the stones of the training ground are legally obligated to swallow her whole. That answers that, she supposes. The question she never asked outright.

Felix winces and runs a hand down his face. “That didn’t… that’s not what I meant.”

“Okay?”

(Annette is not okay.)

Felix looks directly at her this time. “You feel it too, right?”

_(ANNETTE IS NOT OKAY.)_

“This whole year has been—wrong,” he continues, and if he notices that she deflates a little, he doesn’t mention it. “Something’s happening. Something bigger than all of us.”

Annette lowers the axe. It feels absurd to have spent most of last night lying in the dark, thinking this exact thing, and still be disappointed that _that’s_ what Felix is talking about. “Yeah. It feels like the… the end.”

He nods, grim. “We don’t know what’s coming, or when. And we may not be able to fight together when it gets here. So we _can’t_ rely on each other. You need to be able to survive without me, and I need to be able to survive without—” His voice falters just a hair, and a flicker of surprise darts through his eyes. “—without you.”

For the moment, it’s an answer as good as any for Annette. Even if it feels like she’s missing something.

And the next weekend, when Felix is suddenly gone, Annette thinks perhaps he’s taken his own advice too literally. At least…until Professor Byleth rounds up the rest of the Blue Lions and tells them they have bandits to fight in Fraldarius territory.

It won’t be until months later, after all hell has broken loose, when Annette is lying in bed replaying that moment to keep the embers of it still burning in her heart… that she will do the math.

That morning in Pegasus Moon, Felix Hugo Fraldarius, son of winter, demon of lightning and steel, meanest jerk in the Blue Lions, had told her to her face that he could not live without her.

She will finally know what she was supposed to solve for.

And it will be far, far too late.

* * *

If you were to ask Felix when he realized the world was coming to an end, he would tell you: four years ago, when his brother came home as empty armor, and his ghost took up residence in Felix’s skull.

Simple as that.

That was it, the moment he realized how fragile the ground he stood on could be. His brother: gone. His mother: gone, in a different way. His father: revealing that nothing could delight him more than a son dying the _right_ way. Just like that, the three pillars of Felix’s life in Castle Fraldarius crumbled into dust.

Which is why he’s here, in a tiny village on the outskirts of Fraldarius territory, holding his ground until the rest of the class shows up. He knows better than anyone than to trust Duke Rodrigue to protect anything but the family name.

It just… had to be _today, _of all days.

Not that his father picked up on that either. He’s too busy trotting around with Aegis glowing on his back.

Felix still remembers Glenn, right before he left for Duscur, making his rounds for farewells in the castle. He remembers Glenn’s eyes lingering on the wall behind their father’s desk, where Aegis hung to frame his head like a halo.

Glenn left without Aegis, because Rodrigue didn’t want to let it out of his sight. But apparently _this_ little village is worth the ordeal.

Felix channels how he feels about _that_ into a strike of Thunder, sending a brigand flying. He doesn’t miss a noise of surprise from his father.

“I didn’t think you’d have an interest in Reason,” Rodrigue says. The irony of him saying it from the back of a _literal high horse_ is not lost on Felix.

Felix glowers up at his father for a long moment. Then all he says is, “I don’t _believe you.”_

Picking today of all days to pull this stunt. Because that’s exactly what this is, a stunt.

Anyone else would tell you that by all accounts, Duke Rodrigue is still a paragon of Faerghus nobility; some might even say that it is only the frosty promise of Fraldarian vengeance that has kept the shaky lands of eastern Faerghus stitched together.

Felix, on the other hand, will tell you exactly what he’s told his father, to his face, many times: he’s an asshole.

More specifically, he’s the kind of asshole who decides, now that Professor Byleth is a notorious demigod, he just _has_ to have her assistance mopping up bandits. It’s a stunt. It’s been calculated within an inch of its life.

(Unbeknownst to Felix, several elements of the Blue Lions’ assistance have, in fact, been calculated within an inch of their lives. After all, Ashe has one of the few remaining stakes left in the betting pool, and if there’s ever an opportunity for an impassioned battlefield confession, it’s when emotions are already running high in Felix’s home turf. He’s been gradually herding Annette the right way, like a strangely motivated sheepdog. Albeit one who’s also wreaking hell with a Sniper bow.

Between that, and Lysithea egging Annette into taking her Warlock exams—and subsequently getting stuffed into appropriate uniform, with its the _inappropriately_ plunging neckline—the conditions are as optimal as can be. If this fails, the final resort may be an elaborate plot involving an inn that has only one bed. _Someone_ has to stop Mercedes and her ‘mutual pining’ reign of terror.)

_This_ stunt, however, has been more or less engineered in a lab for the security of Faerghus lands, because that’s the kind of asshole Lord Rodrigue is. It’s all about posturing, rattling sabers, shows of strength. He wants rumors to get back to the Alliance, to the Empire, that Fódlan’s new resident semi-deity showed up just to help him sweep out _bandits_ in a backwater territory. Goddess help anyone who tries to mount a _real_ threat. It’s all about the long game, the big picture, the view from the high ground.

It’s never about the people on the ground. Like his last remaining son.

They make mincemeat of the bandits, like everyone knew they would, and Rodrigue makes a big, ludicrous speech about how he couldn’t have faced a _dead fucking king _if anything had happened to this town, and Felix can’t remember the last time he’s ever been this angry—

And you know what? Today, he decides, he gets to actually say it.

He tears into his father. He revels in the flickers of hurt and shame in Rodrigue’s face. It’s the best present he could have given himself. And then he storms off.

Annette finds him first. Not that he went too far away from her; he’s not sure if his subconscious did him that favor. Felix is finishing up helping a merchant board up his shattered storefront windows; it’s late Pegasus Moon, but even this far south in Fraldarius land, snows last well through Lone, even Harpstring Moon.

“Can I practice on you?” she asks.

Felix nods. It’s not the first time he’s been her guinea pig. How, exactly, she manages to be a prodigy of Black Magic, an adept with an axe, _and_ conjure the spare time to master Faith is beyond him. Still, he picks ups minor wounds frequently enough that it’s handy.

(Especially since she hasn’t picked up the trick of Physic, so she has to stick with healing by touch.)

“Are we good here?” Felix asks the merchant, and when the man bows, he waves it off. He and Annette find a quiet corner of the main square to sit in, close enough to the others to be ready to move if they need to, far enough away to let her focus.

He’s found he _really_ likes it when she’s focusing. She doesn’t notice him looking, and the face she makes is really something, with a little knot in her brow, her bottom lip tucked under her front teeth, and—

A few quiet notes slip out as she’s scowling at a shallow gash on his forearm. She hums. He doesn’t think she even knows she’s doing it.

_Goddess,_ he wants to kiss her. What a fool he’s been for trying to deny it. What a fool he’s been for _months._

Long ago, he remembers the professor talking about battles you would always lose. About learning to live with the fight.

He was never, ever, meant to win this one.

Annette draws a sharp breath and sits up. The gash is closed, the skin red and shiny but whole. “How is it?”

“Better,” he says, and he doesn’t mean just the wound.

She curls her first with triumph, grinning. “I think I’m getting faster. What’s going on with your hands?”

Felix automatically flexes his fingers. They’re red, chapped with the cold, a little stiff. A few bleeding cracks in the knuckles. He’s used to it. “It just happens this time of year. At least, up in the north.”

“Excuse _you,_ I grew up in Fhirdiad,” she mockingly chides. “I know what the north does to your hands. Have you—”

“There you are.” Professor Byleth is striding toward him across the stones of the main square.

In her arms sits Aegis.

Felix stares, first at the professor, then at his father.

He doesn’t give a damn if Professor Byleth is Seiros reborn or _whatever_ the real story is, Rodrigue just—just _gave_ her the shield, the one he wouldn’t even let Glenn touch—

Byleth unceremoniously dumps it into his lap. “Happy Birthday.”

Then she walks away. 

Felix would never in a thousand years admit that he wanted to hear those words from at least _one _person today.

He would never admit that it’s because after nearly five years, he’s finally beat Glenn at something.

_He_ made it to his eighteenth birthday.

_Congratulations,_ his dead brother says, flat, _you’ve won._

“It’s your birthday?” Annette’s voice rises to a squeak. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Felix ducks his head. “Pointless,” he mumbles. “Nothing to celebrate.”

He thinks for a moment she’s going to hit him. Instead she stands, looking flustered. “I-I think Mercie’s calling me.”

Mercie is not calling her. Felix is aware of this, because Annette and Mercedes have not been speaking for about a week. It’s been almost as unnerving as the fact that their professor is apparently the vessel of the Creator. He elects not to dispute it anyway.

She scuttles away, and he doesn’t see her again until well into the evening.

The Blue Lions have been put up at a nearby inn, where there was a strange commotion as they checked in—Sylvain and Hilda were hissing frantically at the innkeeper, all Felix caught was _something something only one bed_ as the _very_ annoyed woman shook her head—and he would have been lying if he said he wasn’t nervous about dinner. It’s not like he got a chance to tell Annette he doesn’t want people to make a fuss. Sylvain and Ingrid know better, and Dimitri… Dimitri’s fragmenting at the edges.

Felix tries not to look at Dedue too often, because that unflinching devotion is a little too familiar, but when he does… even he can tell Dedue is worried.

But Dimitri does not crack further tonight, and Annette isn’t even at the dinner table, and disappointing as that is, it’s probably saved him from an embarrassing serenade.

(And if he’s being honest: maybe next year, he wouldn’t mind that. He’d make a face and roll his eyes and maybe tell Annette later that he really liked it. It’s just this year. It’s just eighteen.)

After dinner, there’s a knock at the door. And that’s how Felix discovers what Annette’s been up to.

She’s standing in the hall, braids fraying a little, her bangs doing the cute thing—damn it, when did he allow _‘cute’_ back into his vocabulary—where she’s worked up a sweat and they get the vaguest hint of a curl. She hasn’t even changed out of her warlock uniform.

She’s holding a strange palm-sized jar in her hands, with a fluffy blue bow on the lid.

“Here,” Annette says very quickly, and holds it out. “It’s for your birthday hands. I mean your hands! And your birthday.”

Felix’s entire brain seems to have checked out early. It’s gone, it’s galloped off into the night. He can’t muster up a single word as he takes the jar from her and pries off the lid. There’s a salve inside, smelling faintly of beeswax, mostly of pine. Specifically, the Blacktip pines that grow in Fraldarius hills.

Before he left for Garreg Mach, his mother ghosted into his room with a handful of sachets stuffed with those pine needles. She wordlessly folded them into his trunk, between waistcoats and shirts. Then she patted him on the cheek and said, “Look after your little brother, Glenn.”

His voice broke as he said, “I will,” but that was fine, because his mother wouldn’t tell anyone.

You wouldn’t think he’d like the smell of Blacktip pine very much, but the truth is that he does, because even if his mother doesn’t call him by the right name most of the time, it reminds him that at least _one_ of his parents values his life.

Felix swallows. Then his voice breaks a little as he asks, “How did you know about the pines?”

Annette smiles nervously, fidgeting. “Uh, well, lucky guess, and we were here, and I thought you’d want something to remind you of home, and… I just figured!”

Felix will learn much later that he apparently still smells like pines, and Annette had developed an acute appreciation for the fact. For now, he is simply having a disorienting realization about how he defines _home._

“Thank you,” he manages. Suddenly he connects the dots. “Did you _make this?_ Just now?”

She half-nods, half-shrugs, cheeks turning pink.

He recognizes the look on her face, the one when she’s rallying herself to try a new maneuver, to roll the dice on a spell she’s _mostly_ got down. She’s running the numbers, reviewing her notes, making last-minute tweaks to the formula.

Then Annette does something he never could have anticipated: she gets through his guard.

She’s _never_ moved quite this fast even in axe practice—but in a flash, she’s darted in, stood on her toes, and planted a lightning-fast kiss on his cheek.

_“Goodnight happy birthday!”_

And then she’s gone.

Felix is left standing in the doorway, one hand clutching the jar of salve, the other raised, bewildered, to his face.

And for the first time, he thinks he understands Claude von Riegan, bastard-in-chief of the Garreg Mach. Or at least, they have one thing in common:

They both know what it’s like to get utterly clocked by Annette.


	12. Lone Moon: Fragile Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey y'all! hopefully this chapter will help you pass the quarantine time. <3 things are starting to get heavy, huh?
> 
> (also. sidebar. there's fanart for this?? fic???? and it's amazing???? thank?!?!?!)

**Lone Moon: Fragile Things**

The funny thing about the end of the world, Annette discovers, is that there’s nothing to do, and still not enough time to do it.

It’s a strange kind of mercy, a scrap of good she can salvage from the swift plunge off a cliff and into war: she has no time to think about the fact that, academically speaking, she _did_ kiss Felix last month.

Sure, it was on the cheek. And on his birthday. It was about as salacious as a peck from a granny. But—it meant something.

At least, she thinks it meant something? It was supposed to mean something. But it also _wasn’t_ supposed to, in case Felix didn’t feel like _that,_ and she needed an alibi.

But since Edelgard stormed the Holy Tomb and shattered the peace, the world they knew, and Prince Dimitri in one sweep of the axe… that modest little peck has been left dangling like a hangnail.

There’s no time. They’re rallying for war, there’s no time. The mess hall is doubling as a vulnerary production line now, and Mercie is always there with Marianne, hovering over boiling kettles and wiping thyme-tinged sweat from her face, Professor Manuela conducting the chaos like an orchestra. Ingrid’s been conscripted into the sky watch with Hilda, Sylvain and Lorenz are running cavalry drills, Ashe and Bernadetta and Ignatz have been assigned to the archery and artillery lines… Lysithea is helping Hanneman with magical defenses, along with Linhardt. This would be where Annette could assist, but…

“You’re a mess,” Linhardt tells her in his matter-of-fact way; it’s not a judgment, just an observation. “The measurements must be precise. You should take a nap and come back when you’re rested.”

Annette is allergic to rest. And naps.

So, it seems, is Professor Byleth. She is one of three places these days: speaking in hushed, razor-sharp tones over maps of the monastery’s defenses; putting her class through drills and skirmishes and lectures that feel hideously terminal; or in some corner of Garreg Mach, making pleas to Caspar, to Petra, to Ferdinand _(von Aegir.) _Technically, Linhardt hasn’t joined the Blue Lions, but it doesn’t feel like there’s Blue Lions house anymore. It’s just… everyone who’s left.

Including Annette’s father. She thinks she’s seen him carving in quiet moments, looking older and more exhausted than he ever has. He looks the way Dedue does speaking to Dimitri: like a man who knows it’s a hopeless cause.

Her father hasn’t even asked her where she’s going to be stationed on the battlefield. Whatever he’s carving must be for another losing battle.

The one person Annette doesn’t see is, of course, Felix. It’s not by choice (it kind of is.) They don’t have time for extra practice on the training ground when it’s a revolving door of drilling troops. Annette’s commanding her own battalion now, and she is keenly aware that a group of twenty chatty mages packed into the training grounds is Felix’s own personal hell.

It comes as no surprise that she only sees him in passing.

That little hangnail still gives a twinge each time. 

This is how Annette learns the problem with trying to be flexible, not committing to anything, leaving doors open and hoping the right thing will walk through. You give someone else the power to make that decision and sometimes they _don’t._ Maybe they don’t know you’re waiting, maybe they don’t know you asked in the first place, but the answer doesn’t come.

It’s one more variable in a formula comprised of nothing _but_ variables. Every value she thought was fixed and concrete is as volatile as—as Dimitri. And Annette has done it to herself.

There are only so many hours you can spend running your battalion through their formations, and Professor Byleth only has so many hours to look over Annette’s work. But free time is the enemy; it’s a breach in the defenses against her own thoughts.

It’s in her free time Annette’s mind turns to the worst variables of all: who is she going to lose to this?

Mercie, who wants to talk but _they never have the time? _

Father, who she knows _very well_ is going out of his way to cross her path… but leaves, every time, in silence?

Felix, who Annette knows—all too well—will, when all else fails, be the shield, and take the blow meant for someone else?

It’s not a question of _if._ It’s a question of _who._

She tries to keep herself busy, and winds up kicked out of the stables (too jittery, scared the horses) _and_ the infirmary (same reason she can’t help with the magical defenses) _and_ incredibly, the fish pond (did you know you could upset fish? Annette has learned you can.)

So when Felix finally finds her, it’s in the one place she can’t hurt anything, or at least anything that can protest: in the greenhouse.

She hears his boots on the tiles. He’s picked a habit of scuffing them when he comes up behind her so she isn’t startled from her thoughts, and it’s one of many reasons she kissed him on the cheek last month, and it’s also one of the many reasons she wishes she’d gone for his mouth instead.

“When was the last time you slept?” It’s not a rebuke, but he clearly isn’t happy about it either.

“Last night,” Annette lies. Well, it’s not a lie, it’s more stretching the truth, she _did_ sleep, if you count falling asleep at her desk with every wick in her room blazing.

She buries her hands in the earth, fluffing up the soil so the new roots are aerated. There’s something calming about it, digging in barehanded. Her uniform jacket’s been folded over a branch, and her blouse sleeves are rolled up to stay clean, and really she doubts anyone’s going to care about the state of her uniform anyway right now.

Felix makes an impatient noise. Then, to her surprise, he kneels at her side. “Let’s try again. When did you sleep for more than three hours?”

She reaches for the watering can, trying to ignore the buzzing in her veins. “Last night.” Now _that_ is a lie.

Felix sighs. After a moment, he says, “You know I can see the lights from your room, right?”

Annette almost drops the watering can.

No, she did _not_ know, but—oh _no,_ that makes perfect sense, given where his room is on the second floor, and where—

—but how does he know it’s _her_ room, and how did he know to find her here, and how is she supposed to go on pretending any of this will ever be the same—

“Someone has to make sure the plants will be okay,” she insists, and they both know it’s about more than the plants. It’s about refusing to admit the greenhouse may be broken glass and twisted steel this time next month. “Flowers still grow in a war.”

Felix’s hand suddenly covers hers, dirt and all. A distant part of her notes the chapped cracks have healed over; he’s been using her balm.

Annette looks up at him, unsure.

Felix swallows, face so open for once, it’s like emerging into a night to find the full moon almost too bright. “There are too many idiots here,” he says haltingly. “They’re going to get in trouble on the battlefield, and we can’t stop them.”

Of course he would know it, the worst part of this calamity looming in the stars. Of course his hand would fit like it was meant to hold hers.

Felix’s eyes fix on hers, a weathervane pointing true north, and his voice tears at the seams as he says, “I’m… afraid too.”

Inevitable: that’s what it feels like, their fingers curling together in dirt so much warmer than the rocky, hard grounds of their homes. Inevitable, like scar tissue in the wake of a wound, like the rain that ends the drought, a relief you knew was coming and still ached for, until you knew the ache better than you knew life without it.

Inevitable: they have been falling for months, and now, on the bleeding edge of war, they fall together over the last few inches.

She leans to him, he bends to her, finally, inevitable. It’s a ghost of a kiss, lips brushing together, testing a theorem before putting it into action. It’s the same theorem proposed moons ago, defined in Remire, refined on a bridge outside the Winter Ball, invoked when the professor emerged from the sky a walking demigod. It’s the wild idea that this—them—_together—_could be good.

They linger in that, the quiet of it, for a heartbeat or two. For Annette, it’s half to assure herself she hasn’t drifted to sleep, that this isn’t a dream; it’s half because with the storm breaking around them, she wants something still and soft, almost to prove that she can still have it.

But she can’t have it forever.

Even though it’s not a dream, bells shatter the peace. They break apart, wide-eyed and thunderstruck. Annette has only a breath to be a teen girl who just kissed her crush, who is realizing she left a smudge of dirt across his cheekbone, who sees a bewildered kind of electricity in his eyes and knows it’s the same that runs through her veins—

Then the ringing pattern calls out the soldiers they were trained to be.

Edelgard is at the gates.

It will be five long years before they find the peace of the greenhouse again.

(It will be even longer before the Blue Lions discover, to their astonishment, that someone won the betting pool after all.)

* * *

It all falls apart.

Felix has been waiting for it to fall apart since the boar roared to life in the Holy Tomb. And in spectacular fashion, it does.

Apparently Edelgard put herself in the _vanguard_ for her own army, bringing in rank after rank even after the monastery routed her forces.

Apparently no one, not a single person, in the strategy sessions… had put together a coherent retreat plan.

Apparently Archbishop Rhea is a _fucking dragon._

It all falls apart in hours, everything; there’s no monastery, just a castle bleeding runaways from every orifice. There’s no Professor Byleth, just a chasm and a question. There’s no Blue Lions, just a stream of wounded students fleeing for Fhirdiad as fast as they can.

There is no time.

He wants to talk with Annette, but there’s no time.

No—he doesn’t want to talk, or at least, he doesn’t want to do more than confirm Annette left that dirt on him because she wanted to, and invite her to do it again. Or at least just hold her as tight as he can and beg her to sing for him, just to have that one fixed star in the sky.

But there’s no time.

What’s left of their class rides north, stopping only to change horses. Dedue handles all the transactions for the boar, who is little better than a shivering wreck. Felix knows they’re getting close when Sylvain has to take over negotiations, for the stablemen won’t speak to a man of Duscur.

They make it to Fhirdiad, riding through the gates bedraggled and exhausted. The guards hustle them all down different halls, sending Sylvain to meet with his gods-awful parents, squaring Ashe and Mercedes away. Felix doesn’t see where Annette goes; he has the dubious honor of being escorted alongside Dedue and the boar straight to the war room, where the regent, Grand Duke Rufus, waits… along with Duke Fraldarius. (Dedue, academically speaking, is not supposed to be there. However, the royal guards have correctly assessed who would win that fight, and withheld their objections.)

It isn’t until afterwards that Felix realizes Annette isn’t staying in the royal palace.

Part of it has to be political, he’s sure. House Dominic’s held an odd place in Faerghus nobility, controlling a tiny territory that doesn’t square with the ancient bloodline of one of the ten elites. It also doesn’t help that her ridiculous father was mysteriously absent from the Tragedy of Duscur, and vanished after.

_Funny,_ Glenn’s ghost tells him, _maybe it’s better he ditched his title, because anyone with sense would know what they look like fleeing the scene of a crime._

But Gustave—Gilbert—_whatever_ is back in the royal palace now. His daughter is not.

The days inch by. Felix spends them haunting the library in search of a redhead, and taking his frustration out in the training grounds when he only finds shadows. He’s trotted out like a trophy for war councils. Rodrigue is making sure the other Faerghus houses see his very healthy, _very angry_ heir, and think very carefully about their alliances.

He has to do it because Dimitri can’t. Dimitri’s trying, but it’s a losing war to the boar, growling and lashing out at every turn. The rest of the houses are looking for leadership, and all the prince can give them is a guttural oath of vengeance. So Rodrigue’s job is to make sure everyone sees the weight of the Fraldarius name behind the throne, and knows every sword it commands will point their way if they falter.

It’s all chess, all games, all things Annette would love to break down into formulas, all things he only likes when he gets to watch her explain them. Without her it’s just a dog-and-pony show, and he’s just another beast on a leash.

And with or without her, it all falls apart.

It’s the middle of the night when the storm comes knocking. Felix has been stowed in his father’s guest quarters, where he’s spent too much time staring at the ceiling, thinking about the moment in the greenhouse, how he’s never regretted anything as much as losing the streak of dirt.

The door rattles on its hinges before it blows open. His father surges in, face taut, the only light shed from a flaming fist. “Get up, Felix, _now._ Dress to ride.”

Felix knows that tone well enough to do as his father asks. He resents it enough to not follow orders without question. “What’s going on?”

His father doesn’t answer. Gustave—_Gilbert—_does, waiting tactfully beyond the doorway.

“Grand Duke Rufus is dead. Cornelia swears it’s by Prince Dimitri’s hand, and has assumed the role of regent to have him arrested.”

Of course. Of course there would be a trap waiting, even here. Of course they would think they’d lost everything, but find there was still so, so much that could be taken from them.

There’s a cold place in Felix, one that never betrays him, and that’s where he goes now to keep moving. When they’re safe, he can process. When they’re safe, he can thaw.

Felix yanks on a boot. “Since when do we believe a creepy court mage over the crown prince?”

His father’s lips thin. “That’s why we think she’s not working alone. It’s only a matter of days, maybe hours, before she signs Faerghus over to the empire. There’s a company of guards waiting in the stables for you. Get back to Fraldarius territory and start readying to hold the border, understood? I need to try to get some of Fhirdiad’s weaponry away before she can turn it on us.”

_Areadbhar. _King Lambert’s relic. That’s what he’s staying for.

Felix doesn’t know when it’ll ever stop sucker-punching him, when his father chooses to do only what’s best for a dead king.

“Can the boar even use it?” Felix snaps, knowing his father won’t answer. He shoves his hands into heavy gloves. It’s only been a month since he was last in Fraldarius territory, he knows how cold it will be.

It’s only been a month since Annette pressed her lips to his cheek.

_Annette._

The cold in him falters.

Felix turns to glare at Gilbert. Sure enough, the old knight is still in his castle uniform, nothing road-ready. He’s going nowhere.

He’s leaving his family at Cornelia’s mercy.

Some feral part of Felix can’t wait to get out of this miserable palace, away from these two old men still worshipping a tragedy.

“Where is she?” Felix asks Gilbert as he buckles his cloak, checks over his swords, his knives, the travel pack he never even emptied from the ride out of Garreg Mach. “She’ll be safer in Fraldarius territory than here.”

There’s not even a flicker of comprehension in Gilbert’s eyes. “Who?”

Felix doesn’t know why that’s what gets him. Maybe it’s because he’s watched Annette struggle through those letters to her mother, scouring for the words to tell her this man has abandoned them in every possible way. Maybe it’s because he’s so damn sick of watching her try for him. Maybe it’s because he knows, deep down, he’s trying to do the same.

The frost snaps. He’s got a handful of Gilbert’s collar before he knows what he’s doing, yanking the man closer. “Your _fucking_ daughter,” Felix snarls. “Annette. Where is she?”

“That’s _enough, _Felix!” Rodrigue shoves him off. “Show some respect—”

“It’s fine, Your Grace,” Gilbert says, sounding a little rattled. He names two cross streets and Felix is gone the moment he does.

The palace is halfway between quiet and triage, the corridors either flooded with people or silent as a mausoleum. Felix doesn’t bother with sneaking. This is a race, not an infiltration, and by dawn Fhirdiad will be under lockdown.

He bolts down the halls, makes it to the stables, takes his father’s guards and rides them right out the front gates without a care who sees.

_You need to be smart about this,_ Glenn chides. _You want to save her? Then you can’t afford to get caught._

He splits his guard into three and assigns each a different gate to leave through, naming a small town nearby as their rendezvous point. Cornelia will have to waste precious time figuring out which trail to follow. Annette would be proud.

Felix, of course, takes his group to her house.

It’s not what you would expect of a descendant of the Ten Elite, but it’s exactly what he expected of Annette, a cozy stone-and-stucco affair with window boxes that are exactly two months from overflowing with blossoms. A small Dominic crest is engraved on a plate on the oaken door. He pounds his fist just beneath it until a light kindles in a window.

The door swings open. Annette is there as he’s never seen her, hair tumbling loose around her shoulders, still crimped from her braids; a worn dressing gown is bundled over her nightshirt, a candle in her hand. Her eyes are wide as saucers. _“Felix?”_

Felix has forgotten how she can knock the wind out of him just with his name. He wants her to say it again more than he knows how to want something.

But—there’s no time.

“The regent’s dead,” he says swiftly. “The court mage is framing Dimitri for it. She’s going to hand Fhirdiad over to the empire.”

Annette covers her mouth with a hand, paling until the dust of freckles stands out even by candlelight. He can see that beautiful brain of hers working through the grim math.

“Come with me.” It’s somewhere between an offer and a plea. “You can stay in Castle Fraldarius, it’ll be safer—” No, _fool,_ Annette doesn’t gravitate towards safe, she does practical. “—and you can help hold the line.”

Then he can’t stop himself: he reaches out to touch her cheek. He hears Annette catch her breath.

_Please,_ he asks silently, even if he can’t make himself say it aloud. _Come with me. Please, Annette._

“Annette?” a sleepy voice calls from the top of the stairs behind her. It sounds like hers, but older, a particular kind of weary. The sort born of clinging to a crumb of hope long after it’s gone stale. “Is that Gustave?”

And that’s when Felix knows.

Annette won’t leave her mother. And as long as Gilbert is in Fhirdiad, her mother will not leave.

“No,” Annette says softly, and it’s both for him and for her mother alike, and it looks like it hurts her twice as much. She closes her eyes, covering his hand with hers a moment. She’s shaking. She knows exactly what she’s signing up for, staying in a home that’s about to become enemy territory. “I’m sorry,” she tells him.

He shakes his head. There are too many things he wants to say to her, that she’s beautiful, that she’s brave, that she’s a fool, that he’s the same kind of fool too, that he can’t believe everything is falling apart before he could kiss her the way he’s thought about for months.

All he manages is, “Take care of yourself.”

This isn’t goodbye like it’s been for the rest of the year. This is goodbye with a mortal weight behind it: this may be the last one.

He touches his lips to her forehead, brief because if he waits he knows he won’t let go. She stiffens, then kisses him just as fast, pulling away before either of them get caught in something they can’t walk away from.

She has a family to look after, and he has a territory, and neither of their fathers are going to do it. Maybe this is why they understand each other so well: it’s not about honor or duty or chivalry, it’s about saving what no one else will.

Annette takes her hand off his. “Goodnight, Felix.”

He lets his arm fall, and makes himself say, “Goodnight, Annette.”

Then he turns away. The door closes behind him.

The candlelight stays. It shines through the gap between the boards and the jamb, as it did every night in Garreg Mach, the light at the door watching him go home.

It stays in Fhirdiad as he rides away to Castle Fraldarius, into the chilly night.

When he first came to the monastery, Felix found the greenhouse unpleasant. Too different from the north. It let the weak things thrive, things that were never supposed to be there in the first place.

Now he understands why they needed it. Now he understands what it means to fill it with violent-bright flowers, soaring palms, plants that exist in defiance of the way of the world.

Now he understands why someone would carve out a place in the cold, just to let the fragile things grow.


	13. Five Years

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh CHRIST this one is long, I apologize for nothing
> 
> also if you want to see the fanart, here we go, I did a BIG YELL https://twitter.com/ok_ashira/status/1234480354028769281

**Five Years**

How do you tell someone they’ve kept you alive for a year?

Annette still remembers that day in Garreg Mach, when the professor was halfway through a tactics lecture, and Sylvain of all people was getting hung up on the logistics. Felix had rattled off something outrageous about clearcutting the surrounding woods and stealing enemy horses and, when everyone looked at him like he was throwing a classic tantrum, proceeded to do just that and storm out.

There were two things Annette realized that day, and she kept one to herself.

The first was that, as Professor Byleth explained, the best place to attack a foe is an opening they don’t know they have. Weaken them by cutting off resources—like a forest to hide in. Slow them by taking away their mounts.

Find the opening, slip in the knife.

The second thing Annette realized later, doing her reading, thinking through the types of terrain and the limited knowledge of enemy numbers, comparing it to older battles. That’s when the pieces line up:

Four years earlier, it had been tents, not trees, limiting visibility and let assassins slip in. Most of the enemy attackers had fled on horseback, leaving the people of the peninsula to shoulder the blame.

No wonder Felix had left the lecture. Even in a hypothetical battle, there were far too many echoes of Duscur.

And of course he knew how to change the outcome. He’d had plenty of time to think about it.

There are a lot of people Annette wishes were with her now: Mercie with her wisdom and soft laughter and impossibly perfect sweets; Ashe with his steely idealism; the professor, for a thousand different reasons. All this would be different if Professor Byleth had made it out of Garreg Mach.

Even Dimitri, feral as he was, would make all the difference.

But in the so-called _Faerghus Dukedom,_ more than anyone, Annette wants Felix with her.

Not just in a sentimental way, though not a day goes by when she doesn’t think of him on her doorstep in Fhirdiad a year ago, of his fingertips on her cheek, of the moments that could have been theirs in quiet corners of Castle Fraldarius.

He’d as good as warned her they would have to survive on their own. And it’s thanks to him she’s still alive. That she’s going to survive yet another trip into Fhirdiad.

That she’s going to do damage once again.

He is, after all, the one who taught her to look for the right openings.

“Here we go,” her uncle grumbles under his breath as the carriage draws to a halt before the royal palace. “Behave yourself, Annette.”

She gives him a smile thin as a razor and twice as hard. “I always do, Uncle.”

It’s his fault she’s here.

_That’s not fair,_ her pragmatic side objects, _you know a small barony never stood a chance against the Empire—_

But he never even mounted a fight.

Annette didn’t know what she’d expected the night Prince Dimitri was arrested. All she knew was that she and her mother were in danger, and her father was still in the palace, and she’d just watched the boy she might love ride off into the dark.

She knew what she’d hoped for: a miracle to save Dimitri and hold off the war a little longer. If not that, she hoped for Father to come for her and Mother, for the three of them to go back to the barony, for them to take a stand with her uncle and join the resistance.

But Father never came. Instead, the day before Dimitri’s execution, her uncle’s carriage rolled up to her house in Fhirdiad, and carried Annette and her mother to the humble Castle Dominic.

The next day, Dimitri was dead, her father was gone, and her uncle had knelt to Cornelia.

Now whenever the lady regent summons him to the royal palace, he’s required to take Annette. It’s dressed up as a formal obligation, something about heirs and security, but none of the other defected lords have to bring their next-of-kin. They all know it’s because Annette was a Blue Lion, and Cornelia doesn’t want to leave any of Dimitri’s vengeance-bent classmates to their own devices.

The carriage door swings open. Annette takes a deep breath, then follows her uncle out.

“Lady Dominic.” The Imperial soldier who’s been assigned to guard her today is an older woman, stern-faced and dry-toned. “You may visit the royal gardens, the greenhouse—”

“The library, please,” Annette chirps, trying to ignore the pang at the mention of a greenhouse. “Ours at the castle isn’t very big, and it’s _so_ important to keep up with my studies!”

Her uncle shoots her a look, but he’s never once caught on to what she’s up to. And it’s not like it’s unusual for her to be barricaded behind bookshelves.

Annette’s escort sighs and leads her to the royal library. It’s quiet, even for a library; before Cornelia’s reign, whispers and creaking chairs and crisp parchment still strung through the shelves like cobwebs. Now it feels like a mausoleum, empty and lifeless.

“You again,” the librarian says by way of greeting when Annette walks in. She slides the catalogue across the desk. “Remember the rules?”

“No talking, no magic, no taking books out of the library, no…” Annette pauses, tapping the folded catalogue against her chin. She remembers the final rule, but she’d like the librarian to think she doesn’t. Any airhead impression she can give will help keep suspicion off her.

“No disturbing her ladyship the regent, if you see her,” the librarian finishes.

“Right.” Annette nods, then gasps, sheepishly covers her lips, and mouths, _“no talking.”_

The librarian is not amused.

_Good._ Annette scurries off to the mythology section. Technically speaking, she has no interest in the mythology section, but just in case she’s still being watched, she pulls a book off the shelves, humming to herself. Then she wanders through the History shelves, and winds around Poetry, and finally slips into Magic Theory.

The opening Cornelia doesn’t know she has.

Annette makes double, triple certain the guard and the librarian can’t see her from their posts by the door. Then she scans the shelves slowly, checking every title against the catalogue for this section. Finally, she finds what she’s looking for: an absence.

According to the catalogue, following _Hodgkin’s Collected Essays on Scale and Amplification,_ she should find _Treatises on Alchemical Transference Theory._ Instead, it jumps to another volume of dissertations.

The School of Sorcery has their own library, and the only mages allowed in the palace are under Cornelia’s thumb. Only the regent and her team have been picking at the Magic Theory section.

And Annette is _very_ interested in what they’re taking with them.

She pushes her hair back from her eyes—_I should grow out my bangs,_ she thinks, _they’re not practical anymore_—then pulls a scrap of paper and a pencil from her satchel, braces the paper against the mythology book she borrowed, and quickly writes down the author and title.

She works through shelf after shelf this way, meticulously compiling a short list of the books the Lady Regent Cornelia has pulled for her own purposes. Three of them she’s read before, and she’s familiar with the other two. The list paints a fairly self-evident picture, but Annette doesn’t want to make assumptions.

When she’s done, she slips the paper up a sleeve, then walks the catalogue and the mythology book back (the librarian gets grumpier if she tries to re-shelve the books herself.)

“I’d like to go to the greenhouse, please,” Annette tells her escort.

The woman holds out her hand for Annette’s satchel. Annette passes it over and waits while the guard confirms there’s no smuggled books or secret messages, just a few sheaves of blank paper, a notebook, a pencil, a quill, and a small inkpot. To her credit, she even flips through the notebook, just as Annette thought she might. That’s why the list is up her sleeve, after all.

Once Annette’s bag has been searched, the escort leads her to the greenhouse. Or, rather, the safe part of the greenhouse, the one that was once used for tea parties and evening socials. Everything here is rare and temperamental flowers, foreign herbs, ornamental grass. Nothing poisonous, nothing medicinal, nothing magically potent. This is the only part of the greenhouse Annette’s allowed to roam.

“I’m going to sit and write,” she tells her guard, pointing to a small table a couple yards away behind an enormous Brigid fern. The soldier grunts and waves her on, rubbing her red nose.

_Allergies,_ Annette thinks a bit smugly. Between the library dust and the greenhouse pollen, the guard is having a bad time. Her attention will be on her sinuses, not the girl penning a letter that will have to pass Imperial message inspection anyway.

Annette sits at the table, back to the fern, and takes her time laying out her inkpot, her quill, her notebook, her sheets of paper. She’s pretending to be lost in thought when the guard drags in a telltale breath.

The downright _volcanic_ sneeze gives Annette yet another opening, covering the crackle as she yanks the list from her sleeve and slots the paper into her open notebook. It fits like it’s always been there, just as she planned. The soldier is too busy mopping up her face to notice.

If Annette ever gets caught, she doesn’t envy the fate awaiting her guards. Or herself, for that matter. She tries not to think about either if she can help it.

Instead, Annette reviews the list.

Five missing books, undoubtedly in Cornelia’s study this very moment. Five different angles to a shape she’s still calculating. Annette can make an educated guess: the books all have sections on imbuing materials with magical properties that last beyond the normal casting range, and one is specifically geared towards developing magic-compatible projectile weapons. Most likely the empire’s developing magically-enhanced artillery.

That’s a guess, though. Annette is a woman of science. She deals in facts.

And if Felix’s memory is as good as she hopes it is, he will be able to sift out the fact from fiction.

After all, he’s the reason she’s survived this year, even if he doesn’t know it. He’s the reason no one’s caught her sneaking out intel on Adrestrian R&D.

He’s the one who taught her the power of striking once, and striking hard, before the enemy even sees you coming.

For a moment she stares at the paper, the weight of the greenhouse air bearing down on all sides, and all she can wonder is if his lips are still as soft as they were a year ago. If he hasn’t found a new person to kiss in stolen peace. Much as it would hurt, she wouldn’t blame him for it. Things are bleak in the shreds of the Holy Kingdom, and solace is rare as jewels. She could hardly deny him any comfort that can be pried from the Empire’s teeth.

Even if he ever wrote her back, it’s not the kind of thing he would say in a letter.

She just wishes she were there herself.

She just wishes she knew what to say if she ever sees him again.

How do you tell someone they’ve kept you alive for a year?

Annette takes a deep breath, staring at the list, thinking of how to translate it best. Then she dips her quill in the ink, and sets it to the page.

_To the lords of Castle Fraldarius: I am once again writing to urge you to surrender…_

* * *

How do you tell someone they’ve kept you alive for three years?

There was a cold place in Felix once, sharp and unforgiving as winter, a place he went when he couldn’t afford to lose. A place the ghost of Glenn called home.

It’s been three years of winter now, and the frost is in his blood.

That’s what it takes to survive.

The boar is dead. Or if the rumors are true…worse than dead. Either way: gone. Three years and the only classmates he sees are the other two survivors of the old palace hellhounds, Sylvain and Ingrid. It’s rare to see them, rarer still to see them off the battlefield. Once or twice in the last year, they’ve managed to sneak off to an unused attic and pass around a bottle of something that burns a hole in the cold, trading stories and memories and rumors like blowing on dying coals.

It’s not enough. It’s never enough.

Three years they’ve held the line, but what’s driving them now isn’t hope. Hope would require a path to victory, and they all know that dropped into an abyss at the battle of Garreg Mach.

What’s driving them now is the iron knowledge that the moment the Faerghus resistance buckles, every last one of them will be a head on a pike.

So they fight, if only to hold off the inevitable. Just like the professor told them years ago: there are some battles you’re never going to win. You just learn to live with the war.

There was a cold, haunted place in Felix once, but now the ghosts are in his bones. And the way he’s learned to live with it all is to carve out the place he tried to leave behind.

When he’s lying in the dark, staring at canvas walls of a muddy tent, the smell of blood still trapped beneath his fingernails, he closes his eyes and thinks of a greenhouse. He remembers marigold hair and eyes like a storm and songs like a thaw. He remembers the unyielding, defiant cheer, so bright it was like looking at the sun.

If they meet again, it’ll be because he’s been captured and brought into Imperial territory, or because she’s made it into the losing side of the war and signed her own death warrant. He wants it more than anything, and he fears it more than anything.

So Felix keeps the memories in that greenhouse, and lets the rest of him be as cold as it takes to make it to the next dawn, and thinks of Annette when he’s staring at the sun.

It’s a good thing, he supposes, that he’ll never see her again, because he won’t have to figure out how to tell her she’s kept him alive for three years.

Though she’s done it in more ways than one.

Felix scans the latest letter. Rodrigue knows the procedure now: if a message arrives from the barony of Dominic in Annette’s handwriting, it goes to Felix immediately, even if it’s addressed nebulously to ‘the lords of Castle Fraldarius.’ A few hours later, Felix comes back with unimaginable insight into the magic weaponry being deployed from Fhirdiad.

The code is hardly a code at all, but it’s brilliant in its simplicity. (Of course it is, it’s Annette.) When the first letter had arrived, Rodrigue had read it himself first, brow furrowing. Then he’d read it again, aloud, for the rest of the war council: _I am writing to urge you to surrender. I encourage you, Felix, to reflect upon Professor Steiben’s lectures regarding the dynamics of power at work, particularly the series we attended in Harpstring Moon. _

Felix had frowned at that, trading looks with Sylvain. “There was no Professor Steiben.”

Gilbert, who was apparently content to leave his wife and daughter in enemy territory, had only the humility to stare silently at the table.

The commander of the battle mages cleared her throat. “Can you repeat it, your grace?” Rodrigue read it out once more, and a brief, furious flurry of whispers broke out amongst the casters. When the commander surfaced, she said, “We believe it’s a coded message. Jorg Steiben authored _The Practical Application of Metaphysical Dynamics,_ which has seven volumes. Harpstring Moon would be the fifth month, so… Volume Five?”

Rodrigue passed the letter to his son. “Look into it.”

When the next month saw new arcane traps riddling the battlefield, the Fraldarius forces had already been drilled in countermeasures for the past week.

Felix remembers when they were much, much younger, how a cherub-cheeked Annette tried to smuggle rare books out of the royal library. She’s simply refined the process, it seems.

Her latest letter begins the usual way: _I am once again writing to urge you to surrender._ It would be too obvious if every letter included an admonishment to remember a lecture, so she varies it. The trick is that she’s always, always careful to include just enough truth that the Imperial censors swallow the lies between the lines. Little veneers of fact, like reminiscing on Manuela’s drinking habits, or missing Dedue’s cooking.

This time she tells him she’s planted four Jarvinian tulips, just like the ones that grew in the greenhouse between the Morfis plums. _That’s _a lie. Everyone knew the professor had the Morfis plums staked out like the Holy Tomb (better, arguably.) Nothing else was allowed to send up so much as a sprout in those raised beds.

Felix scribbles a note down—_Jarvinian, four, plants?_ and sifts through the rest of the letter, picking out her warnings. When he’s done, he folds it back up and tucks it into his cloak’s inside pocket, the one over his heart, and lies to himself that he’s keeping it in case the mage commander needs to double check anything.

It’s just paper. It won’t stop an arrow, it won’t ward off a hex, it’s just paper and yet as long as it’s with him, it holds off the cold a little longer.

When he brings his father the final report a couple hours later, Rodrigue scans it, lips pressing together. Then he studies Felix in nearly the same way as the report: calculating.

“What?” Felix asks, brusque. He’d lean from brusque to outright belligerent, but things have been civil with Rodrigue, or close enough to it. It’s war, after all. They don’t have the energy to be at each other’s throats when the enemy’s already there.

“You look…” Rodrigue stops, gathers his thoughts, and apparently buries them for another day. “It’s brave of Lady Dominic to keep doing this,” he says blandly instead.

“Tell her father that,” Felix mutters.

Rodrigue’s tone takes a warning edge. “It couldn’t have been an easy decision for him to leave them behind.”

“Sure it was,” Felix scoffs. “He already had practice.”

Rodrigue is staring at him again.

_“What.”_

His father doesn’t answer a long moment. Then he just sighs and says, “You’re dismissed.”

A little over a year later Annette’s letters stop, and Felix learns what Rodrigue had kept to himself.

“Where is she?” Felix demands, voice rising to carry beyond his father’s study, and this time he doesn’t have to tell Gilbert he’s asking about his daughter. “What do we know?”

“There have been no reports of action taken against the barony,” Rodrigue says a little too calmly for Felix’s tastes. “We have no reason to believe she’s in any danger.”

“She’s been sending us regular intelligence for _four years _and stops out of nowhere, the _fuck_ she isn’t in danger,” Felix snarls.

“Watch your tone.” Rodrigue stands, glancing sidelong at Gilbert. “Cornelia would love to make an example of any traitor. If anything had happened, she’d make _sure_ we know. It’s more likely communications have been restricted. The larger concern is replacing her intel, and that’s something _I_ will handle.”

Felix knows the double-edged rebuke beneath Rodrigue’s words.

Between the lightning and the steel, Felix is a nightmare on the battlefield, he knows that. He has a name. A reputation.

What he doesn’t have is an ounce of charisma.

He and Annette managed to survive without each other, sure. But he’s not good at surviving _with_ other people. He’s never been comfortable around crowds, and giving orders makes him itch. There’s always some asshole who thinks they can do the job better than you and wants to waste your time arguing about it, and there’s always some village dimwit who hears the instructions five times and still manages to shoot himself in the foot.

Rodrigue issues orders like breathing, and Annette always won her battalion’s hearts in seconds, but the last four years has bitterly taught them that Felix cannot command a group of soldiers to save his life. Or theirs.

Not a good look for the heir of House Fraldarius.

“Can you give me and Felix a moment, please?” Rodrigue asks-orders, and everyone else files out of the study. Silence falls with the closing of the door.

Felix waits, wordless. Rodrigue wants him to make the first move. He won’t give the duke the satisfaction.

Instead his father jumps for the throat.

“You need to let go of the Dominic girl,” he says bluntly.

Of all the things Felix expected, that was far, far from one of them. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lies.

“Annette, was it?” Rodrigue asks, like she hasn’t been bailing out their collective asses for the last four years. “We could win this war tomorrow and the two of you still wouldn’t have a future.”

“That’s not—”

“_Think,_ Felix. House Blaiddyd is wiped out. The day Prince Dimitri was executed, Houses Fraldarius and Gautier became the most likely successors to the throne. House Dominic _sided with the empire._”

“It wasn’t her choice—”

Rodrigue, as ever, rolls right over him. “You and Sylvain may very well end up leading the kingdom, did you _really_ think you could marry—”

_“I don’t think any of us are making it to next year!”_ Felix explodes. “You think I’ve spent a _second_ thinking about weddings in the middle of a war?!”

A memory stirs, soft and sun-drenched: Annette, kneeling in the greenhouse, hands buried in the earth, quietly insisting _flowers still grow in a war._

“I don’t,” Rodrigue says, flat. “I don’t think you’ve spent any time thinking about it at all.” He sighs and shuffles the papers on his desk with no intent but to give his hands something to do. “So I’m doing it for you. I’ve already written to Count Galatea. I’m sure he’ll be willing to renegotiate Ingrid’s betrothal, and…”

Rodrigue trails off as Felix’s hand goes to his sword.

Lightning and steel, stone and faith. An unstoppable force and an immovable object. Between them they could split the world in two.

“Don’t be a child, Felix,” Duke Fraldarius says after a deadly pause. “I’m thinking of your future.”

Felix’s hand stays on the hilt. “Again. _What_ future?” His voice rises once more. He wants everyone in this damned castle to hear the truth. “We’re losing this war, and we’re about to lose it _faster—”_

“Lower your voice,” Rodrigue orders.

But Felix has been immune to his father’s orders since the day Glenn died. “—and you can’t admit that _we aren’t making it out—”_

_“GET. OUT.”_ Rodrigue points to the study door.

Felix is more than happy to obey an order for once, slamming the heavy oak door behind him with a crack that rolls to the foundations of Castle Fraldarius.

He has nothing to worry about, in the end. His father never brings it up again. When Ingrid shows up a few months later, they climb to the top of a crumbling watchtower and split a bottle between them once again. Eventually there’s enough of a dull buzz in Felix’s veins for him to ask.

“Well,” Ingrid says slowly, “my father came to me, and said Rodrigue had made the offer, but he wouldn’t force me into anything.” She takes a swig from the bottle, grim, and hands it to him. “Especially not in a war. No one knows if there’s going to even _be _a House Galatea, right?”

“That’s what I said,” Felix mumbles into the glass neck.

“So I thought about it.” She grins wolfishly at him. “And I told my father, ‘Not even if it would bring back Lady Rhea.’”

Felix spit-chokes all over his coat.

Ingrid laughs at him, and he can’t help but laugh brokenly back into the dusty rubble, and it’s such a shattering kind of relief to just laugh at all in the face of a four-year nightmare, and between the dust and the wheezing they both have excuses for the tears in their eyes.

After a while, with more of the bottle drained, Ingrid produces a knife, balancing it on a wobbling finger. “Millennium festival’s coming up,” she says unsteadily. "Oughta clean ourselves up for it."

“It’s nine months from now.”

“Still.”

“You’re not actually going, are you?” Felix asks, wondering if the drink’s hit Ingrid much harder than it’s hit him.

(As a matter of fact, it has not. Felix has not yet attempted to stand up, and when he does in an hour, he will discover that his legs have betrayed him. This will not prevent him from loudly declaring from the top of the watchtower that he is the greatest swordsman in all Fódlan, and attempting to challenge the windowsill to a duel. Incredibly, he will lose.)

“Of course I’m going.” Ingrid picks up the end of her long braid, squinting in speculation. “Goddess, I just want… to see everyone again. Don’t you?”

Felix presses his lips together, furious that she can say it so easily. It takes too long for him to say, quiet and ragged, “Yes.” Then he adds hastily, “It doesn’t matter. There’s no way Rodrigue lets me go.”

“Hmm.” Ingrid wraps her braid around one hand.

Then, in a swift, savage yank, she slices through it with her knife.

“Fuck that,” she says calmly.

_“WHAT ARE YOU DOING.” _Felix nearly drops the bottle. She’s kept that braid as long as he’s known her, her one concession to the kind of femininity she’s always kept at arm’s length.

“Cleaning up,” Ingrid tells him, and tosses the sawed-off braid onto the floor. Then she shakes out the remains of her hair. It’s an absolute disaster, and she looks absolutely delighted. “Oh, damn. I should have done that _years _ago. When was the last time you got a haircut?”

Felix shrugs. He keeps his hair in a tail or a low bun, anything that fits under a helmet, and that’s about all the thought he puts into it.

“All due respect to your father, leader of the resistance, archduke Fraldarius, and all that crap, but…” Ingrid points the knife at him, scowling as she searches for a word, and settles on, _“Fffffuck_ _him._ If he won’t let you go, Sylvain and I will… we’ll steal you. Or something. Got it?” When Felix only shrugs again, she leans closer, slurring, _“Felix Hugo Fraldarius,_ you repressed little asshole, you are _going_ to the reunion. _GOT IT?”_

Defiance. Reclamation. A refusal to let joy be stripped from you.

It’s something he remembers, because against all odds, it lives in him still, in the greenhouse he carved out of the winter.

Because Annette’s kept him alive for going on five years now, alive in the way that matters.

Because choosing this means maybe, maybe, the most precious and dangerous of words, _maybe_ he’ll see her again.

_“Fine,”_ Felix snaps. He half-heartedly shoves Ingrid away.

She holds the knife out. “Then it’s your turn.”

The next week, when Sylvain arrives for another war council, it’s his turn to laugh so hard he cries at his two idiot friends, who got so drunk they decided to cut their own hair, _while drunk,_ with the exact results you’d expect.

Felix doesn’t mind. Ingrid had sought out a maid to help fix her hair almost immediately after she’d sobered up, but Felix likes the mess he’s made of his own. It feels good to carve a scratch down Rodrigue's image of the perfect Fraldarius heir.

He’d understood it the moment he hacked through his own long tail, the weight and the release. He and Ingrid aren’t deluding themselves about the future. They’re choosing who they’ll be when they face the end. And that’s something not even his father can control.

He hasn’t felt this light years.

Gilbert, surprisingly, takes Felix’s side for once.

It is, _un_surprisingly, for garbage reasons.

“We think he may return to Garreg Mach for the reunion,” the old knight says. “The attacks are moving progressively southeast, headed toward the monastery.”

Rodrigue nods, staring at the map. “If Prince Dimitri surfaces, we need to provide support as soon as possible.”

_You mean containment,_ Felix thinks but doesn’t say. He’s learned one lesson bitterly well these five years: don’t argue against your own win.

Let these old, delusional men try to wrestle a crown onto a boar. If it means Rodrigue sends him to Garreg Mach… Hell, if it’s why his father’s backed off the marriage talk, Felix will take it.

“I’ll contact Margrave Gautier. We should send you and Sylvain together, and if the rumors are true, you can escort the prince back here. If they’re not…”

Rodrigue’s voice fades away as Felix tries to will his face into its normal bored annoyance. He’s going to the reunion.

He’s going to—going to see Annette again.

Maybe.

Maybe, the most dangerous word.

* * *

Two riders leave in Ethereal Moon from two sides of a war, bound for Garreg Mach, bound by so much more.

The stars are their only witnesses again, hanging over them both like the questions they’re riding to answer:

Who has the war made them into?

Who will they be as they face the end?

And above all else:

How do you tell someone that for five solid years, only their song, only their steel, has kept you alive?


	14. Ethereal Moon: No Return

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters in one week?? in this economy???
> 
> also I want y'all to know that I am writing this from the edge of the solar system, because this fanart yeeted my soul from my body so hard it achieved escape velocity and is currently passing the Voyager satellite: https://twitter.com/relic_crusher/status/1259636303773065216 thank you okashira and tiffo, you have murdered me and for that I am very very grateful (and tiffo: you are not overanalyzing.)
> 
> sidebar: the response to this fic has been incredible and I am a lil bummed I'm not a more active fandom member. some of y'all may have an educated guess about what I do for a living (and if you don't? hey! don't worry about it! nothing to see here!) y'all may also know my industry can be rough on people writing fanfic under their own names, and a bitch is too tired to make up yet another discord/twitter profile, so. just know I see at least the love on social media, and it means a lot. <3

**Ethereal Moon: No Return**

As Annette sits tucked in the corner of the tavern, picking at meager stew and warming her hands on the stein of hot, watery cider, she has come to a terribly grim conclusion: the outfit was a mistake.

The whole plan may be a mistake, really. Siphoning coins, nonperishable food, and travel gear from Castle Dominic’s supplies (which, all things considered, _should_ be considered hers anyway now that she’s of age.) Waiting until the week before the Millennium Festival to trot her horse through the gates on some nonsense “errand,” with her heavy cloak handily covering the packs lashed to the saddle.

Haring off down the road with only a letter declaring her a messenger of House Dominic, bound for the southern border. She’s gotten _very_ good at forging her uncle’s signature.

The outfit, though. That’s where she’s really had an uncharacteristic lapse in judgment. Bright orange capelet in the middle of snowy winter? Check. Vivid teal bows trimming _everything?_ Check.

Buttons, clasps, and brooches all shaped like a stylized crest of Dominic? Check, check, a thousand times check.

_Subtle._

All Annette had thought about was bringing the clothing best suited for Garreg Mach this time of year, where mountain weather could veer from frost to blazing sun in the blink of an eye. Her mother had given her this outfit for the last midwinter festival, and it was practical with its layers and _maybe_ a little cute with the tailoring and she wanted to be cute—

Well. No. She wants to look fierce and mature. She wants to look like the schoolgirl days are gone and she has earned the _Lady_ part of her title. She wants to look equal to the battlefield ahead of her, because after this, there will be no going home.

She wants to look like the equal of any Blue Lion that makes it to the monastery, even with House Dominic on the wrong side of the war.

_Especially_ if one of the Blue Lions is Felix. If he can even leave the Fraldarius front lines.

Perhaps that’s a lot to expect from one outfit. (Or from herself, part of her whispers, only to be promptly stuffed behind a lifetime’s worth of unresolved abandonment issues. She’s gotten very good at that too.)

But the biggest problem with the outfit is that between the eye-catching colors and the crest-themed embellishments, it practically screams, _I’m the Fugitive Annette Fantine Dominic, You May Have Seen My Wanted Poster. _Or the posters that are sure to go into production once word reaches Cornelia.

There are, of course, solutions (strip the buttons off until she can sew them on at the monastery, keep her drab outer cloak on and her hood up even indoors, channel her inner Mercie and keep her voice cool and pleasantly forgettable when sliding coins to the innkeeper) but—but—

It’s getting harder to tell herself that that was the only oversight. That she’s doing anything but abandoning her family for the slim chance she might see the rest of her class again. That she left her mother and uncle with sufficiently plausible deniability so Cornelia’s revenge won’t fall on them.

But maybe that’s why she keeps making herself ride past dark, a little longer each night, going further, staying out later, putting more and more distance between her and her home.

She made her choice. It’s too late to go back.

“All right, miss?” the tavern-keep asks, pausing by her table.

She’s a kind-faced older woman, and technically this town is out of the dukedom proper and in disputed territory, and all Annette wants to do is pour her heart out to her. To ask if she’s the world’s biggest fool for running full-tilt into a fight she’s going to lose. To ask if it’s worse because part of her wants to do it for a boy, one she hasn’t even heard from in five years.

But Annette has not survived those five years by trusting strangers. And she doesn’t need one now to tell her she’s being a fool.

So she just nods, lips pressed together in a thin smile.

“Where you headed?”

“South,” is all she says, purposefully vague.

Not vague enough, though. The tavern-keep cocks her head. “Not a lot of people headed south these days. Especially not on their own.”

“I’m meeting friends,” Annette lies, and she doesn’t know if the lie is that they will meet, or that they will still be friends.

The older woman seems to pick up on her reticence, for she nods and shuffles on. Annette traces a dark knot in the table’s rough wood. It looks a little like a cat, she thinks.

She hopes someone fed the monastery cats all these years. But the older, more practical part of her knows that would have taken a miracle.

Like the miracle—no, the string miracles—she’s desperately hoping to find at Garreg Mach.

* * *

“Table for three,” Sylvain says to the tavernkeeper, resting an elbow on the top of Felix’s head. It’s Sylvain’s favorite joke, acting like he’s _so much taller_ just because Felix hasn’t grown at all in the last five years. Neither has Sylvain, but he _feels_ taller, the same way Ingrid does. Maybe it’s just that they’re older, in more ways than one.

“Get off me,” Felix growls. Sylvain does not.

If this were five years ago, Felix could have punched Sylvain in the nearest available kidney. Unfortunately, Sylvain’s armor means that would go badly for virtually every bone in Felix’s fist.

Sylvain’s throat, however, is only protected by a shirt collar. Felix punches him in the windpipe instead.

Sylvain lets out a dramatic, indignant wheeze as he staggers back. “Did you see that?” he croaks pitifully to Ingrid.

“I see someone who keeps blowing off my advice to get a throat-guard,” Ingrid answers, shoving both of them after the tavernkeeper.

The older woman leads them over to the corner, probably to keep them from bothering the other diners. “Where you headed?” she asks.

“South,” Felix says shortly.

Five years ago, Sylvain and Ingrid would have yelled at him to be polite. Now, they all know better.

“Isn’t that funny.” The tavernkeeper waits while they squeeze around the corner table. “Had my first southbound traveler in weeks only yesterday. Something going on?”

“Just migrating south for the winter,” Sylvain says, firing off a wink like a ballista. He leans on the table, turning on the charm as he quizzes the woman about the inn’s offerings.

It’s deliberate, of course. None of them want the tavernkeeper remembering them, and Sylvain could distract a dead tree if he really put his mind to it.

“Who do you think will be there?” Ingrid asks under her breath.

“Don’t know,” Felix mutters back. There’s a knot in the table, one that looks like a cat if he squints.

Ingrid hesitates, then soldiers on. “Do you think Annette—”

“I said I don’t know,” Felix interrupts. He doesn’t.

_You want to, _Glenn says matter-of-factly.

It was a strange thing; his older brother had stayed quiet for most of the war, letting Felix wade through the blood and the death on his own. It wasn’t a relief per se. Sometimes the worst things crept through the open silence in his skull.

But with every step closer to Garreg Mach, Glenn’s voice gets clearer, more insistent.

_You want to know if there’s any point to all this,_ Glenn tells him. _Or if you’re going to die like me, chasing after a beast. But what’s the plan when you see her?_

_If,_ Felix thinks back before he can stop himself. It’s an _if._

It’s been five years. Five years across enemy lines. Only a fool would risk the journey across the graveyard that’s the Faerghus Dukedom.

Only a fool would hope she hadn’t moved on.

Felix prods at the knot in the table. Maybe the cats are still at the monastery, at least.

Ingrid looks sideways at him, then turns a broad, tight smile up at the tavernkeeper, the kind that says she’s about to address this problem with the most reliable of her available coping mechanisms. “What do you have to drink?”

* * *

It takes longer than it should for Annette to reach the Oghma mountains. Imperial soldiers patrol the roads more frequently here, no doubt scouting for any stragglers or rebellions stewing in the wreckage of the monastery. Each time she has to hide in the brush costs her precious minutes, and those stack up to hours, and before she knows it the sun is sinking into the last night before the reunion day.

Crumbling towers jut like a jawbone at the horizon. Almost there.

There’s too far to go. But she’s come too far to give up.

Instead she rides through the frigid night, winding down overgrown roads and switching to foot when the terrain gets too rocky. The closer she gets to the ruins of Garreg Mach, the heavier her legs get, the lighter the sky, the faster the beat of her heart.

Maybe, maybe, maybe they’ll be there. Maybe she hasn’t made this journey on a fool’s hope. Maybe there’s something worth fighting for here, even if it’s a last stand.

Annette ties her horse up at the ruins of a gate. She staggers past abandoned houses, weed-filled gardens, she hears voices, shouts—a snarl of something that could have been Dimitri once, a fierce and familiar order, steady and unreal—

Either the ghosts of Professor Byleth and Dimitri have never left Garreg Mach, or the first miracle is standing in the remains of the street.

And they’re not alone. Her father, Ashe, Mercie, _Mercie_ is running to help, they’re here, it’s been five years but they’re _here._

There’s something to fight for, still.

Annette stumbles into a sprint for her friends, the old magic answering her call once more as she runs for daybreak.

* * *

There’s a beast in the ruins, and it’s worse than Felix thought.

The fight is a short, bloody blur, because the Blue Lions may be outnumbered but they are certainly far from outclassed. And Felix is—motivated.

(He would call it motivated. Sylvain and Ingrid will later tell Mercedes that when the bright, determined _“I’m your girl” _echoed faintly to their end of the run-down village, Felix stopped in his tracks, utterly winded. Then he proceeded to carve a path straight through every poor bastard in his way, and neither Sylvain nor Ingrid were entirely sure he was going to go around the buildings or just hit them with his sword until they had the decency to move.)

But now the seven of them are standing around a beast in the decrepit courtyard, a beast with a resurrected god at his side.

Half of Felix is there in that courtyard, listening wordlessly while Gilbert brings both the professor and the boar prince up to speed. Half of him hears Ingrid speaking to that creature like it can still hear her, hears Ashe and Mercedes trying to remind it why they’re here, hears the gravelly rasp of an answer for the hole where Dedue should be.

That half of him will process and weigh and work through the necessary adjustments, and maybe it will even grieve a little for the man who deserved better than dying for the boar.

The other half of him can’t stop staring at the sun.

She glances his way every so often, little darting looks across the courtyard, and he desperately hopes it’s not making her uncomfortable because he absolutely can’t stop.

Five years. Five years, he’s been thinking about this, about her, five years the ghost of a song and a greenhouse have kept him from turning into a beast like the boar.

And now, at what very well could be their end, she’s here.

It’s worse than he’d feared. It’s better than he dreamed.

_Maybe,_ Glenn laughs,_ just maybe, getting drunk with Ingrid and cutting your own hair was a mistake._

Gilbert pulls the professor into the monastery for a private word. Dimitri slinks off. Sylvain and Ingrid and Mercedes and Ashe have somehow discovered an interesting pile of rubble they need to investigate, elsewhere, immediately, and Felix still hasn’t said anything, and Annette’s still standing there looking at him like she did five years ago on her doorstep, and Glenn is shouting _Move, you damned fool—_

“You cut your hair,” Annette says, gloved hands knotting together.

Felix’s last surviving brain cell quietly, grimly starts trudging towards the grave.

“You stopped sending letters,” he blurts out.

Annette blinks up at him, a flush staining her cheeks. “Cornelia was getting suspicious. I didn’t want to put my mother in danger.” Her tone shifts from tentative to faintly indignant. “Besides, it’s…not like you wrote me back.”

Felix has decided that this been a pleasant enough trip, but it’s time to return to Fraldarius territory now, _now, _thank you. If that’s not possible, he would like to go find a hazardous-looking rubble slide to trigger instead and bury him alive. “I didn’t—I didn’t know you wanted me to.”

(Sylvain and Mercedes have both smelled blood in the water. They have exchanged glances and subtle nods, and begun the laborious process of tactfully meandering back over to save their disastrous friends from themselves and what appears to be a lethal dose of hormones.)

Annette half-shrugs, a little sheepish. “You didn’t have to, you were probably busy—”

“No, I—I mean I was, but…” Felix _‘I’m in Hell, I’m in Hell right now, I am dying and this is Hell’ _Fraldarius runs a hand through his hair and briefly considers stealing Ingrid’s Pegasus, flying to Derdriu, and living out the remainder of his days as a street performer.

_Calm down,_ Glenn tells him. _Try again. Isn’t she the one who taught you mistakes aren’t the end?_

Felix clears his throat. “They were really useful,” he says stiffly. “Your letters. They saved a lot of lives. Probably mine too. I… didn’t think I’d be able to thank you in person.”

(Sylvain and Mercedes have slowed to a crawl. Perhaps there’s still hope.)

Now Annette is beaming, even if she looks embarrassed, and Felix is pretty sure he’s going to die where he’s standing.

She scuffs a foot on the ground. “It was the least I could do. I had to go to the royal palace all the time anyway, Cornelia didn’t want me left alone.” At Felix’s baffled look, she elaborates. “Whenever I was there, I’d figure out which books she’d checked out from the library, make a list, and then write up the letter.”

“While you were still in the palace?” he demands, voice rising. She nods. “But that’s _dangerous.”_

(Sylvain and Mercedes have picked up the pace once more.)

“Not as dangerous as fighting on the front lines,” Annette huffs at him.

“That’s different.”

“Is it?” She plants her hands on her hips, hips he is _excruciatingly_ aware of because the coat-dress-cape-_thing_ she’s wearing is so, so much more form-fitting than the school uniform that he’s pretty sure it can be listed as his official cause of death. “I was worried about you too, you know. _Especially_ since I never got any return letters.”

“Annie.” Mercedes winds her arm through Annette’s, smiling angelically at Felix. “Would you like to go with me to see the dining hall? Maybe some of the dishes are still there. Oh, Felix, it’s so good to see you again. We’ll have to catch up soon.”

“Sure.” His voice comes out a bit strangled. “A-Annette. I… should have written you back.”

She narrows her eyes at him. Then an unexpected smile slips over her face like the dawn, the corners of her lips curling with the hint of a laugh. “Villain.”

Mercedes leads her away, and that’s how Felix learns that there is a bow, a _bright teal bow,_ bouncing at the small of Annette’s back, just above her—

An armored hand slaps Felix’s back. “How you doing, champ?” Sylvain asks.

Felix watches Mercedes and Annette until they’ve vanished around a corner, hopefully out of earshot.

Then he sits on the nearest suitable pile of rubble, buries his face in his hands, and answers, “I am _completely fucked.”_


	15. Guardian Moon: Sunlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, this kills the writer: https://twitter.com/nervmaid/status/1272040133328547840
> 
> thank y'all for having so much fun with this <3333 I apologize for absolutely nothing in this chapter

Guardian Moon: Sunlight

“The fact is,” Annette sighs around a mouthful of stale scone, “I ruined everything.”

Mercie tilts her head and laughs, and her laugh hasn’t changed in five years, and that’s one of the few things that makes things bearable in Garreg Mach.

Garreg Mach, which is more cemetery than monastery; if you listened to Prince Dimitri for longer than a minute, you’d think him as much a phantom as the ones he’s imploring for solace. Yet Annette’s father seems just as determined as ever to cinch a crown around Dimitri’s head.

It does not escape Annette that her father never gave up on the prince in the last five years. Not even once.

“Try dipping it in the tea,” Mercie suggests, submerging her own rock-hard scone in her mug.

They haven’t found a replacement for the long-gone teacups yet, and while Mercie worked miracles to make the scones happen in the wreckage of the kitchen, they’ve been rationed out perhaps a bit too carefully, outliving their palatability. At least it gave Annette a chance to catch up with her, even if she’d been tactfully diverted to organizing what remained of the cookware. They’d even had a moment to themselves to blurt out how stupid their fight had been years ago, and then that was that, it was just like old times.

Until Mercie found her old cookbook in the rubble, the page still open to a recipe for Duscur walnut-stuffed sweet rolls, in Dedue’s steady, precise handwriting. At least she had a handkerchief—of course she did, she’s _Mercie—_to press to her face while Annette rubbed her back.

Little things keep popping up like that: a tea tin stamped with House Gloucester’s seal. A long-dry jar of Ferdinand _(von Aegir)_’s saddle polish. Little ghosts and long shadows, because they’ve all claimed their sides in the war.

Annette and Mercie didn’t need to ask; now when they need a break, they take refuge in one of their old rooms, where the only ghosts are their own.

Today it’s Annette’s room. Mercie leans against the bed as Annette continues to salvage her desk. “Now why, exactly, do you think you ruined everything?”

Annette studies the drawers. She’s fighting a losing battle to the spiders in there; they have tentatively called a truce, simply so she doesn’t have to think about them.

No more than she has to think about the old, dusty wooden doll collecting cobwebs in the corner.

Annette purses her lips. “He’s avoiding me. I can’t believe the first thing I did was _yell_ at him.”

“Perhaps Felix should have written you back, then.”

“But the letters weren’t _real!_ They were intelligence reports!” Annette tentatively cracks a drawer open. It appears to have housed several generations of spiders, judging by the number of sad, crumpled little husks inside. “It’s like getting mad he didn’t write me a thank you note to a—a shopping list! And what was he supposed to say, _Thank you Annette, all that espionage you’re doing is super helpful, keep it up, P.S. I sure hope the imperial censors don’t read this’_?”

“Did you want him to write back?” Mercie asks over her mug of tea.

Annette’s frown tilts.

She and Mercie never talked about—any of this. _Goddess,_ that fight was stupid, and then there was no _time_ to talk about any of it.

The fight may have been stupid, but Mercie certainly is not. She’s giving Annette the look that says a gentle-but-firm reckoning is at hand.

“Maybe if I wrote him actual letters,” Annette hedges. “I just was… worried.”

Mercie hums into her tea. “I’m going to make a guess,” she says carefully. “And that is that you were worried for all of us… but especially for Felix.”

Annette hangs her head, cheeks burning. There’s a cramped kind of relief in letting this sit in the open. “When did you know?”

“Oh, hmm.” Mercie taps her chin. “Wyvern Moon?”

“Wyvern Moon?” Annette echoes, yanking another drawer open, only to yelp when a spider scuttles out from between bottles of ink. She slams it shut. “But I was in Dominic.”

Mercie’s laugh stirs the dusty air. “Oh, Annie. Wyvern Moon, _five years ago.” _She shrugs at Annette’s mortified gape. “Felix doesn’t let many people get close. And you always made time for him.”

(Mercedes is, of course, leaving out the fact that her stake in the betting pool was _‘denial and pining for the rest of the year.’_ By all accounts, she won, and the only one she enjoys lording it over now is Sylvain.)

Annette lets out a sigh and steps back from the desk, tying her hair back. “It doesn’t matter. We can’t… I mean. It’s House Dominic.”

It’s not as bad as Caspar or Dorothea. No one knows what to say to them when Dimitri snarls another blood-soaked fantasy of crushing the Empire. No one knows quite how to make the handful of Kingdom soldiers stop eyeing any former Black Eagles like they might be poisoning the food.

But Annette’s caught a few of those stares herself. Ashe’s defection from House Rowe was public and finite; her reconnaissance within House Dominic was a card the Faerghan rebellion kept close to the chest, for her own safety. The damage is done. No one knows what to do with the niece of a turncoat.

Not even Felix.

“Do you still have a crush on him?” Mercie presses. “It’s been years.”

Annette stares at her. “Mercie. You’ve seen him, right? I mean you’ve _seen him.”_ Then she brings the heels of her hands together, making a sharp _V,_ and holds them up. “He—he’s like a _cheese wedge._ I didn’t know a human torso could _do that.”_

“So that’s a ‘yes,’ then.”

“Yes! But—” Annette yanks her gloves off. It’s chilly, but she’s not going to ruin them with dust. “—he can’t be seen with _me—”_ The gloves are tossed unceremoniously onto a chair. “—like that, because there’s no _future_ where that works out!” Then she shoves her bangs out of her face. “I’m sorry, I’m not yelling at you. I just… wish my uncle never…”

“You know why he did,” Mercie reminds her. “But maybe with you and your father here, that will help your family’s name.”

Annette _hmphs,_ yanking the drawers open one by one. The spiders’ time has come.

“Did you ever tell Felix how you feel?”

Annette blushes. “Well. Kind of. Right before Garreg Mach fell… we… may have kissed in the greenhouse.”

Mercedes nearly drops her tea.

“In the—in the greenhouse?” she repeats.

Annette nods, hands on her hips as she strategizes her attack. “But then the bells rang, and I didn’t see him again until the night of the coup, and…” She trails off, mouth twisting. “Anyway, I think he knows. Or at least he knew. But now he’s avoiding me, and if it isn’t because I yelled at him for no reason, it’s because House Dominic is—wait.”

Annette cuts herself short, staring at the surface of the desk as she works out the variables and the calculations. Mercie doesn’t seem to notice, lost in calculations of her own.

“That’s what I can do,” Annette breathes. “I can get Crusher from my uncle. Maybe he’s the baron, but if Dominic’s _relic_ is on our side, that—that should prove our loyalty, right?”

“Sure,” Mercedes says a bit distantly.

“Sometimes you’ve just got to tackle a problem head on.” Annette rolls up her sleeves and makes sure all the drawers in her desk are open. “Alright, spiders! It’s over!”

A bit too late, Mercedes realizes exactly how Annette is going to carry that momentum into exorcising the spider colony from her desk. She doesn’t have time to shout a warning before the glyph fires up.

And for a moment, it works _gloriously._

Wind surges through the desk, sweeping up a few quills, more than a few dust bunnies, and _definitely_ all of the spiders, dead or alive.

The problem, Annette realizes too late, is that her bedroom door is closed, and so are her windows, and the spiders need somewhere to go.

The _problem,_ Annette realizes much, much too late, _is that it is now raining spiders in her room._

(Later, when they’ve stopped screaming, and when Annette is calm enough to carry on with her cleaning alone, Mercedes will excuse herself to the kitchen knowing there’s no way to get there that won’t hurt. One route goes past a room that’s stayed quiet, dark, untouched.

The other gives her a perfect view of the greenhouse.

Ingrid and Ashe are the ones who find her in the dining hall, handkerchief pressed to her face, flipping through the battered cookbook, searching for walnut-stuffed sweet rolls.

“It was the greenhouse,” Mercedes laughs damply into the cotton, and tries in vain to wave Ingrid away. “Dedue won the betting pool.”)

* * *

These days, Felix is certain of few things, but one of them is that if left to his own devices, he will be a complete and unmitigated creep.

More specifically, he will be a creep around Annette, and an asshole around her father. Her father richly deserves it. Annette does not.

And Glenn, the absolute bastard, won’t let him forget it. When he’s not scolding Felix for leering at her like a pervert (but _why_ is there a bow there, why is there a bow _there)_ he’s reproaching him for all but running screaming every time he catches a glimpse of marigold hair.

_You’re not exactly going to sweep her off her feet from the other side of the monastery,_ Glenn scoffs before he falls asleep.

And all Felix can think, every time, is that if his options are a) humiliating himself and making Annette deeply uncomfortable because he can’t think straight around her, or b) keeping his distance with an ironclad delusion that he can _maintain_ this distance, and that will be _fine—_

If those are his options, he knows what to choose.

It doesn’t keep him from peering out the window every night to see the candlelight spilling from her room.

It doesn’t keep her from his dreams.

But that’s _all_ it’s going to be. It’s _fine._

Sylvain has made it clear he disagrees. Sylvain, in fact, has staunchly refused to be around what he’s describing as Felix’s ‘_distressing and powerful energy.’ _

It’s a cover, as it usually is. Sylvain only makes that joke on his way out of the wreckage of the cathedral, after his unofficial shift.

Felix isn’t sure who started the first watch on the boar; he just knows that for a few hours every other day, he lurks in the shadow of a column, eyes on the tattered obelisk of a man. Eventually Ashe comes to take his place, or Lysithea, or Shamir. Part of him is grateful it’s never been Annette, so he never has to leave her with that unstable husk of a prince.

Part of him wants it to be her, so he can have an excuse to say her name, if only in passing.

The boar is never alone. _All _of Felix resents it, that he has so many people ready to help reckon with his ghosts, when the Fraldarius way was to bury the dead and pretend they could move on unhaunted.

Felix is on watch when Professor Byleth announces the surprise trip to Dominic. If Annette and her father hadn’t already left, he’d have tossed aside all pretense to demand to know what in the ever-loving goddess’s scant remaining _fuck_ they were trying to prove.

(It would be rhetorical, at least partially. He knows what Annette is trying to prove; there is _very_ little room in her dress to hide that wooden doll.)

When Felix hears she and her father have left, all thoughts of distance drop straight off the cathedral bridge.

He spends fifteen minutes making an impassioned case for Professor Byleth to bring him along—he knows the war-shredded north, he moves fast on his own, he’s a dual threat in magic and melee combat, he—

“You’re supposed to be packing right now,” Professor Byleth tells him. “I sent Sylvain to tell you an hour ago.”

Felix finds Sylvain draped against the wall by the dining hall, flirting with a blushing line cook. Sylvain sees him coming and grins, sheepish. “Oh, hey, Felix, I have a message from the Professor—”

“Want to see a trick I just learned?” Felix says flatly, and once again, punches Sylvain in the throat.

It’s a quick battle for one that almost went terribly awry.

Many years later, Felix will learn that the professor’s battle plan was _designed_ with him in mind. More accurately, around the fact that the moment the baron so much as looked funny at Annette, Byleth had (correctly) anticipated Felix would start firing off Thunder like it was going out of season.

And the moment the knights close in around Annette, Felix is already on the move.

He has to take a few detours through the unfortunate assholes in his way, but by the time he hits the line of muscle and armor between him and Annette (and, Felix supposes, her useless father) she’s already whittled some of them down.

There is a moment then, when he cuts down one knight, and another is swiftly, neatly vivisected by a razor wind; it’s a moment so familiar, so bizarrely _grounding, _because it is the first time in years he’s fought alongside Annette.

He forgot how hypnotic she can be on the battlefield, hair whipping around her steel-forged face, hands working nearly as fast as her mind as she spins up formulas and glyphs.

There’s a moment there where time seems to freeze them both in place, like they’ve both walked into the same childhood home. That old storm is blazing in her eyes, the one he discovered the first time she knocked him on his ass in the training grounds, the one that may just knock him out again now—

Annette fires off a spell over his shoulder, and time roars back into motion, five years of battle instinct unsheathing its claws. He takes his place beside her, and then it’s easy, it’s all too easy, it’s the dance they both remember, felling their foes, keeping each other safe. It’s older even than the war and the winter in his bones.

And then it’s over.

They’re both winded, bewildered, staring, lost for words. Somewhere the baron is pushing the relic into Gustave—Gilbert—_whatever’s_ hands. Somewhere Professor Byleth is sounding the signal for them to fall back.

_Anything,_ Glenn sighs. _I’m begging you. Say literally _anything.

“Hkh—” Felix’s voice cracks. He coughs out an unsteady, “Hey.”

“Hi,” Annette returns, fingers tangling together. “That was… I mean… you—did really good—sword?” Then she pushes the hair from her face, wincing as it snags, and hurries past him. “I have to go!”

Felix’s belly sinks. She’s clearly still mad, he was such a damned _fool_ not to write back— “I’m—I’m sorry about the letters,” he calls after her retreating back with desperation and more than a little determination to focus on the important things instead of, say, _why there’s a bow there._

All Annette does is bury her face in her gloved hands and let out an utterly inexplicable _“Noooo!”_

The only mercy is that Ingrid collects him from the field, instead of Sylvain.

They don’t tarry in Dominic lands, making a hard push south and only stopping after they reach Fraldarius territory. Even then, they have to make do with a town gutted by war, too close to the border between Fraldarius and the “dukedom” to remain unscathed. Only a handful of stubborn, haggard-faced farmers are left; they have no issue with the party sheltering in the ruins of an inn.

Felix is stuck on Boar Watch after dinner, which is likely for the best. It gives him something to stare at other than Annette.

It doesn’t give him anything else to _think_ about, though. Or anything to _listen_ to. Every so often he catches her voice pushing through the night like crocuses in snow, and has to remind himself to keep breathing.

Sylvain takes up the watch close to midnight. Most of the camp is quiet now; most of their classmates have claimed rooms in the abandoned inn, despite rotting doors and broken windows. It’s been long enough for Felix to recognize the dangling sign, the torch-brackets shaped like wolves.

They’d come here on his birthday five years ago, when Aegis had been handed off, and Annette had made him the hand salve. Somewhere in Castle Fraldarius, he still has that long-empty jar.

Felix slings his pack over a shoulder and heads inside, figuring if all the rooms are taken, he can sleep on the floor downstairs. It’s mostly quiet, only Ingrid’s distant snores rumbling from upstairs.

Then a quiet clatter arrests him in place.

Someone is moving around one of the back rooms. But no one has any business being up this late, not after a battle.

Felix eases his pack to the ground with a silent grimace. Things are hard this close to the border and the battlefront. He needs to tell Rodrigue to send more aid, especially if someone’s desperate enough to try to steal from a war camp.

Felix draws his sword too, because he knows what desperation can make someone into.

But when he steals over to the doorway the noise is coming from, he doesn’t find a starving scavenger. He finds Annette by lanternlight, wrestling with a bowl of dough.

“Just—_stir—”_ she growls through her teeth, before looking up, seeing a sword-wielding man in the door, and making a vertical leap of approximately three continuous feet into the air.

The ceramic bowl lands on the floor with an unmistakable _crunch._

“Oh, _fuck,” _Felix says, as Annette splutters, _“FelixwhatareyouDOINGHERE!”_

Maybe he’s just too tired to overthink things, because he musters a coherent answer for once, sheathing his sword. “Looking into the late-night noises in the abandoned inn. What are _you_ doing?”

Annette stares at the broken bowl. Belatedly, Felix realizes her chin is shaking as she kneels to pick up the pieces. “I thought I’d make breakfast for everyone ahead of time, so all we’d have to do is reheat the pancakes in the morning.”

He hurries over, dropping to his knees as well and pushing her bare hands away from the broken pottery. “You’ll cut yourself. Let me.”

“I don’t want to make more work for you,” Annette protests as he piles shards in his gloved palm.

“It’s fine.”

(Felix does not tell Annette that this may in fact be for the best. He’s no judge of cooking, but he’s pretty sure pancake batter is not supposed to _stay_ bowl-shaped even without the bowl. If anything, it may be worth keeping on hand so they can see what happens when it’s fired out of a trebuchet.)

“Why were you trying to make breakfast?” he asks instead.

Annette leans back, wrapping her arms over her chest despite the heat of a fire in the oven nearby. “It was supposed to be easy,” she says, and her chin is shaking again. “My uncle was just supposed to give us Crusher, but he had to make a _fight_ out of it, and I just wanted to do _something.”_

“We got a relic out of it. That’s more than enough.”

“It doesn’t feel like enough,” Annette says bitterly.

That’s when he realizes the weight of the wooden doll isn’t hanging in her pocket.

He dumps the broken pottery into a nearby scrap bucket. “You have nothing to prove to your father.”

Then he stands and strips his gloves off before holding out a hand. It’s too dark to check the leather for slivers, and he’s not going to risk passing any to her.

Annette takes it and lets him help her up. Then she doesn’t let go, palm lingering flat against his.

It feels like a storm brewing there, delicate lightning crackling where they touch.

“Felix,” she says, tentative and precise, “I’m not just trying to prove something to _him.”_

There’s a greenhouse in his heart, wild and overgrown, vines pressing against the glass, leaves threatening to unfurl like war banners against the cold in his bones—but he was raised to get _everything_ right the first time, there is no room for error—

He can’t believe Rodrigue ever thought he could give up on this, on her. He can’t believe his father would even ask.

The words that break free are the ones he didn’t know, until this moment, he wanted to hear. “You’re already enough,” he says from a place in his throat he didn’t know he had. “More than enough. You always were.”

And summer breaks through.

There was a kind of hesitation when they kissed before the war, when it was a question they were both asking, afraid and hungry for the answer in equal parts.

There is no hesitation now.

It’s incredible, Felix thinks, how somehow she fits against him even better than before, how he likes the hint of sugar only when it’s from the sudden flick of her tongue against his lips. How he isn’t sure if she’s humming or if it’s just the memory of her in his dreams, because _goddess_ has he dreamed about this in a thousand different ways, and _goddess_ it’s so much better in the flesh.

His subconscious is good, but it can’t fill in the way her fingers feel sliding up his throat, tangling in his hair. It can’t replicate the soft noise she makes when he brushes teeth against the pulse below her chin, or the startled one from him when she lies back onto the kitchen’s stone island, drawing him above her until he’s fighting not to crush her against the tiles. In his dreams, he never felt thin whispers of silk stockings as his fingers graze her knee and head north; it was always skin, and somehow the silk is better.

Felix’s subconscious has not prepared him to lose his virginity in a decrepit kitchen, but he is rapidly and seriously weighing the prospect.

Then Annette breaks away, flushed and blinking. It would be adorable if not for the bone-hard sobriety in her face. “Felix,” she says again, searching his face, “what are we doing?”

It’s a question so weighted with interpretations it nearly breaks in half. What are they doing here, now, tonight.

What are they doing in the middle of a war, when steel or magic might leave another cold, empty room in Garreg Mach.

What is the Fraldarius heir doing with the daughter of a traitorous house.

And she means all of them.

“I don’t know,” he admits.

Annette draws a breath, staring up at him, hands still knotted in his hair, his shirt, one leg wound around his. All she says is a quiet, firm, “I need you to know.”

There’s a telltale scale of creaks as someone descends the stairs. They hastily peel apart, straightening collars and brushing down hems as they stumble to put an innocent distance between them. Felix can’t help noticing with an ugly bit of satisfaction that if it weren’t for Annette’s turtleneck, the mark on her throat would give them away anyway. Some part of him likes it even better that only they two will know it’s there.

(He will discover tomorrow morning that he is, in fact, in much worse shape; Sylvain absolutely does not believe for a second that the trail down his neck was from the battle. Nor should he; Felix is red as a tomato the entire time he spins that lie.)

Gilbert-Gustave steps through the door, eyes moving between Annette and Felix. “I thought I heard something,” he rumbles.

“I was just… getting some water.” Annette picks up the nearest cup. It’s unconvincingly crusted in grime.

“And I thought I heard an intruder,” Felix half-lies. “It’s, uh, fine.” He wants to stay, to piece together the answers Annette deserves, to taste sunlight on her again.

Gilbert doesn’t look particularly inclined to leave. He steps inside the kitchen, leaving the doorway clear, and Felix gets the message loud and clear.

But he doesn’t answer to Gilbert. Instead Felix looks to Annette.

She’s knotting her hands, a blush still tingeing her cheeks as she looks quickly at him, then away.

“Goodnight, Felix,” she says.

That’s a message he’ll take. He heads for the door, giving her father a long, stony look as he says back, “Goodnight, Annette.”

That night, Felix dreams of summer.


End file.
